When Pain Speaks. Listening to the body’s intelligence in a species that fears change

 

Light through clouds – a reminder that pain is not an enemy, but a messenger.

Medicine is expected to offer an intelligent relationship to pain.
Not because numbing pain is difficult – it isn’t.
Anyone can dull pain with fentanyl, if they can access it.
Anyone can feel high self-esteem with amphetamines, less anxious with alcohol, more focused with nicotine.
This is not the realm of medicine.
This is the realm of chemistry used to silence what we do not want to feel.

When someone has studied pain for years, we expect something deeper:
an intelligent answer to the question of pain – not only a distraction from it.

Because pain is not one thing.
It speaks many languages.

Clearly the excruciating pain of metastatic cancer will require chemistry.
But doesn’t the pain of childbirth teach something about motherhood?
The first cry of a newborn – not a laugh, but a cry – tells us something essential about the relationship that parenthood demands from the first second.

The pain of grief teaches us about attachment – about the very human bond that, like a craving revealed only in withdrawal, shows something new when the fear of living without becomes visible.

The pain of trauma, in its own way, also speaks of attachment – but from the side of rupture, shock, unsafety where safety was expected, betrayal, confusion, disrespect, unmet need.

The pain of a broken limb teaches us about bodily integrity – about being whole.
Surgery – through the functional divisions of bodies proposed by anatomy – has developed extraordinary tools to repair these breaks.
But even there, the deeper questions remain: what broke the body in the first place? And – what is it about change that causes pain?

Every relational pain asks its own questions:
Why does the relationship exist if it hurts – physically or psychologically?
Is a relationship defined by its quality, or by the expectation that it should exist?

Pain remains, first and foremost, a mystery.
This is why medicine is a living field – or should be.
But somewhere along the way, medicine stopped being interested in addressing pain causally and followed instead the fear of change.
It became obsessed with preventing change, controlling change, denying change.

I did not study medicine to disrespect the change that life actually is.
When that change causes pain or leads to death, I studied medicine to understand why that change took place – not only to reverse it, but to understand the incorrect vital relationships that sustained it, and therefore learn what correct vital relationships truly are.

I did not study medicine to negate nature and the vital relationships it proposes.
I did not study medicine to turn life into an illusion of something predictable, static, comfortable.

We end up with a paradox – a medicine obsessed with prevention, preventing what has not happened at all, while neglecting the pain that is actually here.

When medicine simply offers the “medical versions” of what people can find in the streets – fentanyl, anti-this, anti-that – it abandons the very intelligence that pain requires.

Pain comes from us, and we are not our own enemy – it speaks, and we need to listen.
Pain is, at the very least, a communication.
A question.

And our task – at least mine – is not to numb it, but to learn from it.

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