Putting pain into perspective

To understand why the pharmaceutical industry’s approach fails to cure a chronic disease, we have to first understand the difference between static and dynamic balance. All living things exist in dynamic balance – inhale exhale, ingest-eliminate, yin-yang. Health is not a destination. Health is a journey of many peaks and valleys. Even if we say to ourselves “I want to be healthy,” it doesn’t mean that when you reach that goal, you can go back to doing what got you into trouble. You have to maintain your health your whole life. For the medical industry, health is not a journey, it is a business. Every single patient is an opportunity to make money. Imagine this: your car stops working, so you take it to the repair shop to get it fixed. The mechanic explains you have a flat tire, and that he will fix it for 20 dollars. 

Human bodies don’t work that way. A flat tire will not directly affect the function of other parts of the car, but the dynamic balance systems in our bodies affect one another. The effect of one failing part can be hard to understand, and the “side effects” of chemical drugs are legendary. Managing your health is similar to coaching a football team - you have to work with all of your players individually but in full consideration of the rest of the team. You need to consider their interactions on the field, train them to cooperate, know each other, and develop tactics to win the game through team effort.

Defense and Offense are equally important (in our bodies that is Prevention and Treatment/Symptom Management), and every position can win or lose the game. When treating any health issue, every component, every organ, and every system needs to be considered as part of the whole. Chronic pain is a symptom - it is the result of something going wrong on the inside, and every symptom is a message sent by our bodies. The problem is that we often don’t hear the message clearly and misinterpret these signals, and it gets even less clear when symptom-suppressing drugs are involved. Every single human body is different, yet medical doctors are trained to follow numbers-based solutions to address our problems. The reference ranges on their tests are often too wide and ignore the interactions of multiple systems. Your normal may be at the top of the range, and if your current value is at the low end, you are told that everything is fine, when in fact it is not fine for you.

There is a huge difference between a symptom and its cause. We (the whole society in practically all disciplines) have been programmed to manipulate symptoms without addressing their causes. Taking a painkiller will most likely make your headache stop, but it will not resolve the underlying issue, the reason why your head hurts. Taking a pill is the easy way out - not for yourself or your body, but for the medical industry. This is a good strategy for them to create an income, but an entirely ineffective strategy from the perspective of lasting health. If you keep covering your symptoms, they will come back even stronger after you finish your prescription. Painkillers don’t really kill the pain, they just put the monster to sleep for a little while, and even though they can relieve the constant pain you might be in, they are not the solution, they are just a temporary patch, just like the one I mentioned that did not fix your flat tire. They can be useful temporarily to allow us to be well enough to make the changes that will have a lasting impact, but they themselves aren’t the solution.

Pain is the most disruptive symptom of all, especially when the pain is chronic, crippling, constant, and seemingly unending. Everyone dealing with chronic pain will agree that nothing can be worse. Hot flashes? A piece of cake. Itchy rash? No big deal. Watery eyes? Oh, come on. Try debilitating pain for a couple hours and then we can talk. Those who have never experienced it can’t really understand. A person in chronic pain would do anything to make it stop. And the medical industry knows it. They know that a patient at the edge of his/her physical and mental endurance will pay any amount of money for as little as a promise of relief. Dr. William Davis talks about an interesting phenomenon in his brilliant book, Undoctored: he says that because of idealized and unrealistic medical TV dramas like ER, General Hospital, Grey’s Anatomy, or even Dr. House, our idea of how the medical industry really works is massively distorted. There is no George Clooney behind the office door waiting to save the life of a poor person in pain without health insurance. There is no Nurse Joan that will babysit your kids for free while you undergo a complicated treatment because people should help each other. The reality is much more brutal, and millions of people on this planet experience this reality every single day.

Chronic pain has been the main driver behind the deepening opioid addictions that are sweeping the country. The pain is not just physical, it can be emotional or psychological, and indeed we are compelled to do almost anything to make it stop. The denatured extracts - morphine and heroin - or the artificial analogs - Oxycontin, Vicodin, Hydrocodone - are able to stop the pain, and make you feel “normal” for a while. The unintended consequence is their addictive nature, and the need for a greater dose, because they deplete your neurotransmitter reserves without restoring them.