Opinion | Is Pain a Sensation or an Emotion? - The New York Times - 0 views
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The United States uses a third of the world’s opioids but a fifth of Americans still say they suffer from chronic pain.
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This has forced many to take a step back and ponder the very nature of pain, to understand how best to alleviate it.
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The ancient Greeks considered pain a passion — an emotion rather than a sensation like touch or smell.
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In the 19th century, the secularization of Western society led to the secularization of pain. It was no longer a passion to be endured but a sensation to be quashed.
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having pain designated a “fifth vital sign,” alongside blood pressure, temperature and breathing and heart rate.
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This coincided with the release of long-acting opioids like OxyContin. Doctors believed they now had an effective remedy for their patients’ suffering
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the mind does play a pivotal role in the experience of pain. After a pain signal reaches the brain, it undergoes significant reprocessing.
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They can also result in a condition called opioid-induced hyperalgesia, in which people feel more and more pain as they are prescribed higher and higher doses of opioids
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looking back it’s clear that using opioids to treat chronic pain — backaches, bum knees and the like — might well be considered the worst medical mistake of our era.
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How much something hurts can vary depending on factors like your expectations, your mood and how distracted you are
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Physical therapy that doesn’t just manipulate joints but also addresses the context pain comes alive in, encourages optimism and builds emotional resilience has been found to be more effective.
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Conditions like depression and anxiety greatly increase the chance of developing chronic pain, while patients who experience pain are at high risk of developing depression or anxiety
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Objectively, there is no doubt that illnesses and injuries can cause immense suffering. The question is how severe that suffering is, and how long it lasts
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rug companies greatly underplayed the risks of opioids, while billions of dollars in marketing told people that pills were the only answer to their ailments.
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future doctors should be taught that pain is part of the story of the person who suffers from it, not just a separate physical phenomenon.
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unfortunately our health system encourages doctors to see as many patients as possible as quickly as possible. We need to change how physicians are paid in order to give them the time to really talk with patients about their pain.
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I felt that the pain was my body’s way of telling me that something was wrong, and I didn’t want to silence that voice with a temporary fix.
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What pulled me out after almost a year of agony was not just rigorous physical therapy that molded my spine back into shape but also the kindness of my friends, my family and my future wife.