That nagging pain ...

For a few weeks (gasp!) I have been dealing with discomfort, which has compelled me to learn a tad about human anatomy.  Anytime I engage in such learning about the human body, I am reminded of my daughter, who, after her first exposure to learning about anatomy in medical school, remarked that it is a surprise that we don't drop dead like crazy. 

Our complicated anatomy itself is evidence that no intelligent god designed us--anybody with half my intelligence could have put together a better Lego model!  Then there is the remarkably complex biochemistry.  And then the mind, which is beyond our analytical understanding.  Seriously, how do people sincerely believe that a god designed and created all these?

Such a highly complicated system means problems of various kinds.  One of those is chronic pain.  All I have is discomfort.  Not even pain.  And then there is chronic pain, which is "estimated to affect a fifth of the global population, or 1.5bn people."

Even reading that sentence is enough for me to consider myself lucky.  A while ago, I stopped asking my mother about her pain because there is no point.  "It is always there," she said a couple of years ago.  More recently when my father asked my mother about her pain, my sister cut him off with "stop asking her everyday."  I did joke with my mother that if she lived in Oregon she will be able to use marijuana.

I suppose as long as we humans have been around, we have also been bothered by pain.  And we have searched for remedies.

Our instinct when in any kind of pain, acute or chronic, is to make it stop. We reach for drugs, typically one of two groups: anti-inflammatories such as aspirin and ibuprofen, or opioids. Both types of drug are blunt, ancient instruments that have been around in various forms for thousands of years, a fact that would be quaint if the pills weren’t also potentially lethal. Aspirin derives from willow bark, whose first-recorded use as a painkiller was in Egypt in 1500BC. The opium poppy is known to have been cultivated in Mesopotamia in 3400BC (the Sumerians apparently called it the “joy plant”) and opium was recommended before surgery from at least as early as the second century AD, when the Greek philosopher Celsus recorded its use as an anaesthetic.

The prolonged use of drugs is, obviously, one hell of a problem.

Developing the miracle painkiller drug is not easy:

Pain medication faces distinctive problems that don’t apply to other drugs. Unlike cancer, for example, pain doesn’t have clear biomarkers: you can’t measure the effect of a drug that treats it by counting white blood cells. Instead, researchers rely on patients giving their pain a score on numbered scales, from one to ten, say, or on a visual scale, where the individual marks the level of their pain at a point on a line between two extremes. But pain is infuriatingly subjective. The placebo effect is significant: give someone a sugar pill and they’ll report an improvement in their pain just because it has been noticed and apparently treated. There is no way of knowing if one person’s report of their pain means the same as another’s. “Your nine is different to my nine,” said L’Huillier, who looked somewhat despairing at the thought of such a crude measure being used to determine the efficacy of a drug in which his company had just invested hundreds of millions of dollars. “I have no idea what your nine is versus my nine. And that’s what we’re using in trials.”

Which is what my daughter told me after he early years in medical school--there is no way to compare pain.  Your pain is your pain.

May you have a pain-free life!