Atop a stack of twenty mattresses the beautiful princess tossed and turned all night. Rising bruised and very sleepy, she found someone had placed a pea under her mattress to test her royalty. This fairy tale of the princess and the pea is an exaggeration of the real intrigue about pain.
Why might a specific condition be barely noticeable to one person, but so distressing to another? Are pains only in our mind? What is pain? And what are some of the ways now used to fight pain?
Research reveals that one-third of the U.S. population--some eighty-six million--live with some kind of recurring pain. That's enough aching men, women, and children to fill seven of our largest cities. Yet only in the last ten years has intensive attention focused on the treatment of pain.
Pain is personal; there is no instrument to measure it the way a thermometer measures fever. The point at which one feels pain is called the "threshold of pain." A group of investigators took X rays of people who suffered from arthritics of the spine. The radiologists were asked to rate the severity of the disease and the patients were asked to describe the degree of pain they felt. The correlation was poor. The way the patients felt did not match the way the doctors described the severity of the diseases.
Pain: Our Most Common Health Problem
Pain varies with circumstances. Dr. Harry Beecher, a pioneer in the study of pain, compared soldiers wounded at Anzio in Italy in World War II to civilians with comparable injuries. A majority of the soldiers didn't require relief, but a majority of the civilians did.
A person's state of mind is important when dealing with pain. For example, a meditating yogi can divert his mind away from painful stimuli and perform amazing feats, such as sitting on a bed of nails.
On the other hand, severe pain can start a vicious cycle. One's mental ability to cope may break down, resulting in an all-consuming focus on the pain. When no cause for the pain is found, people assume it must be imagined, when, in fact, all pain is real. The only "fake" pain isn't pain at all; it's a deliberate lie.
Americans are a pained people. Louis Harris and Associates studied the pains of 1,254 adults and found the following:
· Ranked by percentage, Americans says they suffer from the following pains one or more times each year:
headaches, 73 percent; backaches, 56 percent; muscle pains, 53 percent; joint pains, 51 percent; premenstrual and menstrual pain 40 percent; dental pain, 27 percent.
· Americans lose 550 million work days each year; the major causes are dental, back, and stomach pains.
· Pain seems sexist, occurring more often in women than men and causing women to take more time off from
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