Geoffrey Johnson

I’m no stranger to pain that is easily explained. I have broken large and small bones playing sports, discovered first-hand that no amount of protective clothing will save you in a motorcycle mishap, and spilled buckets of blood on the home-renovation battlefront.

Usually I am able to rate pain on a scale of one to 10 and simply ride it out. But I have also experienced excruciating pain – the blinding, lip-biting kind that reveals to the world that you know some really bad words – where there is no obvious source. Since I had disc surgery almost 40 years ago I have had to endure occasional lower back pain that clocks 20 or more on my personal pain scale. Ordinary pain killers have about as much impact on it as a flea on a whale’s back.

What makes it worse is that the medical profession still struggles for the most part with the  concept of pain that has no obvious cause.  Doctors cannot send pain to be lab tested.  Since they cannot measure it, see it or feel it, many have a distressing tendency to under-rate it, mis-diagnose it, or dismiss it altogether. This can place additional mental strain on the sufferer. 

A few of us are lucky. We find a pain specialist ready, willing and able to tackle the problem from our perspective. What we need is a wider understanding that pain is sometimes something unto itself, not merely a direct by-product of injury or illness. Without that understanding, treatment at best is a hit-and-miss affair. Clearly, the medical profession needs to go back to where attitudes on pain are shaped -- our medical schools.  Great advances have been recorded in the understanding of pain mechanisms in the years since my back pain started, but too many clinicians are still woefully unaware of them.

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