We are a species that evolved to survive starvation, not resist abundance - Atul Gawande

During the Second World War, for example, Lieutenant Colonel Henry K. Beecher conducted a classic study of men with serious battlefield injuries. In the Cartesian view, the degree of injury ought to determine the degree of pain, rather like a dial controlling volume. Yet 58 percent of the men — men with compound fractures, gunshot wounds, torn limbs — reported only slight pain or no pain at all. Just 27 percent of the men felt enough pain to request pain medication, although such wounds routinely require narcotics in civilians. Clearly, something that was going on in their minds — Beecher thought they were overjoyed to have escaped alive from the battlefield — counteracted the signals sent by their injuries. Pain was becoming recognized as far more complex than a one-way transmission from injury to “ouch.

You know, there’s this phase of people’s lives in which they can’t really cope on their own, and we ought to find a way to make it manageable.

For the solution to chronic pain may lie more in what goes on around us than in what is going on inside us.