The Ying and Yang of Pain: Protective Versus Damaging

JUAN C. CAVICCHIA; CRISTIAN G. ACOSTA

Psychiatry and Neuroscience Update: Bridging the Divide

Springer International Publishing AG

Lugar: Berlin; Año: 2015; p. 267 - 291

From day-to-day experience (be it direct, for wefeel it ourselves, or indirect, because of what weare told about someone else?s experience) everyoneknows what it feels like to be in pain.Localized, episodic injuries such as scrapedelbows or knees or breaking a bone; toothaches,giving birth, heart attacks and headaches are allforms of acute pain, while migraines, cancer, andheart pain are examples of more permanent formsof pain. In all these cases, however, pain permeatesour entire lives. It is easy to assume that this?perception? is the end of the story: ?pain-is- pain?,and that is all there is to say about it. It clearly isnot. In fact, the way in which people react to whatthey describe as something ?painful? has changedconsiderably over time. In the eighteenth andnineteenth centuries people believed that painserved a specifi c function [ 1 ]. It was seen as amessage from God or Nature; its infl uence wouldperfect the spirit. ?Suffer in this life and youwouldn?t suffer in the next one?, was a commonway of summarizing the prevalent beliefs at thattime. Submitting to pain was required. This viewcould hardly be more removed from twentiethand twenty-fi rst century understandings, wherepain is regarded as an unremitting evil to be?fought?.