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It seems like people for some reason are always looking to assign blame for the origin of pain. Either you blame a physical underlying cause that is apparent in some way, or you blame the person for making it up or being too weak to handle what others think should be a tiny amount of pain. The purpose of pain med protocols in hospitals is to prevent doctors from having the power of assigning that blame to the person and punishes them by giving them little pain meds when they cannot find a physical origin, or like the doctor who wrote that one article, believe the person is just making it up. I understand that it’s really important hospitals don’t assist drug addicts by subscribing them pain medication, but I also think it’s probably better to err on the side of caution, at least initially. Just because pain does not seem real doesn’t mean that it isn’t, and if there’s anything that’s come up as a theme in our discussion, it’s that no one can determine what kind of pain a person is experiencing besides that person. The other interesting thing about the scale they use is that someone who has never experienced that much pain in their life (no broken bones, etc.) is probably not going to have the same scale for how intense pain is than someone who has gone through childbirth. I can imagine that when one is in intense pain, it is probably difficult to think about anything that could be worse and acknowledge that they pain they feel is only really a five, when it is the worst thing that they have ever experienced.

Another thing I wanted to touch upon as that I think the goal of medicine should not be to create a pain-free world. Most pain is there for a reason, and serves as a means of keeping us in touch with our bodies. It is a warning signal that tells us that our bodies need us to stop whatever it is that we are doing. Chronic pain typically does not fall under this category, as someone can be lying down perfectly still and still be in incredible pain, but sometimes it might. I wonder what kind of information people who are chronically medicated for pain are missing out on by having their neural pathways for pain blocked off. Is it possible that paying attention to the pain and working through it in a more naturalistic way would be more likely to resolve it permanently, rather than simply covering it up again and again? I don’t have any idea whether this is true, but I thought it was interesting to think about.