Pain conditions are hard enough for those living with them to understand, let alone those fortunate enough to neither have a pain condition themselves nor to be living with someone who has one. Government statistics from 2013 show that approximately 15 million people in England alone are living with a long-term health condition. Many of those people will be experiencing pain of some description; in fact, several years ago the British Pain Society estimated that 10 million people across Britain were living with pain. If we choose to look at that purely from a financial point of view this means that millions of working days each year in Britain are lost due to pain. That alone should be cause enough for pain to be openly discussed, yet it remains one of the most taboo health issues around.
There are a huge variety of reasons that someone may be suffering from pain, ranging from an acute form such as a sprain or broken bone which will be fully healed in a matter of weeks through to chronic forms which may remain for the rest of a person's life. People may experience regular flare-ups of pain every four to six weeks due to painful periods, for example, or have neuropathic pain which is present all the time. It is individual and will vary person to person, even where the cause is the same. The only real way of knowing just how someone's life is impacted by pain is to talk to them about it. Yet here in Britain we tend to shy away from actually discussing such matters. Oh, we will casually ask if someone is alright, but what most people really want to hear in response is "I'm fine, how are you?" There is often some rather obvious discomfort if a person living with a pain condition answers truthfully and begins to enthusiastically discuss their pain.
Possibly because we have so many wonderful medical treatments around now - thank goodness - it is often assumed that pain can be completely controlled by medication. People can be forgiven for believing that someone living with pain is guilty of exaggeration, because surely with all the medication available nowadays, pain can be controlled?
The sad truth of the matter is that many pain patients continue to suffer awful and debilitating levels of pain, some of which remains a mystery to doctors. For people like me who have a combination of several different pain conditions and take a variety of medication, the pain remains a very frustrating symptom.
So why is talking about pain such a taboo?
In all honesty that is a question that I cannot answer without a serious amount of research. I suspect though that there is an element of embarrassment there, a feeling of not knowing whether or not people are 'supposed' to ask personal questions about an individual's pain and perhaps plain discomfort at seeing someone else in pain. Certainly I know that my mom hates to see me in pain, as does my husband who is my full-time carer. His way of dealing with it is to be as proactive as possible by doing things such as learning to administer IM injections of pain reliever for those times when the pain become really unbearable, which has definitely made a big difference.
I would like to talk to someone else though; not just about the pain and how it impacts on my life, but also just about the world as a whole. That would be pretty spiffy actually, if someone came to visit me and just chatted.
Does anyone have any other ideas why pain is such a taboo discussion topic?
