Suffering and pain are not always the same thing. Read on to hear the reflections of “A Country Doctor” on this topic.
“Suffering ceases to be suffering in some way at the moment it finds a meaning”
– Viktor Frankl
“It is much more important to know what sort of a patient has a disease than what sort of a disease a patient has”
– William Osler
Back in the 1990’s when pain was the newest vital sign, physicians were mandated to treat it, often with powerful medications and without truly understanding the cause and significance of the pain for individual patients.
Plato and Aristotle didn’t include pain as one of the senses, but described it as an emotion. The word “pain” is derived from Poine or Poena, the Greek goddess of revenge and the Roman spirit of punishment. Her name is also the origin of the word penalty.
Of course, pain was never measured objectively in antiquity or when it became a “vital sign” a couple of decades ago. It still can’t be measured, which makes it no more of an objective clinical sign than someone guessing their temperature without a thermometer.
“Pain and Suffering” is a legal constellation that equates the significance of the two afflictions; doctors, however, have wanted to think of the two as separate, one or the other, treated differently. In many instances, doctors treated only one – the one we call pain – and skirted around the other. We have pain specialists, but perhaps only end-of-life care formally addresses suffering; it is seldom a topic in everyday medicine.
How many times, when a patient has said “I hurt” have I asked “where” instead of “how” or “tell me more”, assuming the Chief Complaint is physical.
How many patients with chronic pain are unrelieved by our usual pain medications? And how many of them receive the label “psychosomatic”, but little help from their doctors?
A few weeks ago, I came across a short piece by Dr. Thomas H. Lee in The New England Journal of Medicine about suffering. I have continued to think about it ever since.
I think medicine embraced pain assessment and pain treatment in a way that overcompensated for our ineptitude at mitigating suffering. Even as we treat patients’ pain, we sometimes cause suffering through the dehumanizing way our clinics and hospitals work.
Eric Cassell describes suffering as something that happens when our personhood is threatened. Sometimes physical pain, disability or the threat of dying is the cause of suffering, but sometimes the threat to personhood is loss in other spheres. In order to alleviate suffering, physicians need to understand something about the nature and meaning of this threat.
Doctors in our era are trained to treat diseases. We are not often formally trained to explore the person with the disease; this is something we are left to discover on our own, when the disease paradigm doesn’t seem to fit the patient we are trying to help.
The movement we now call “narrative medicine” is focused on the subjective meaning of disease and suffering. It offers a way out of the mechanized mindset of evidence-based medicine that is built solely around the lowest common denominators of diagnoses and treatments. The corporate-scientific medicine of today dismisses the statistical “outliers” and individual variations between patients in its efforts to help the greatest number of individuals, instead of each particular patient in the physician’s exam room.
Doctoring is a personal calling, built on personal relationships. Even statistical outliers deserve health care that works for them, and suffering can never be understood or mitigated without first seeking knowledge of the suffering person’s own fears and beliefs.
Eric Cassell writes:
“The doctor-patient relationship is the vehicle through which the relief of suffering is achieved. One cannot avoid ’becoming involved’ with the patient and at the same time effectively deal with suffering.”
How many doctors are comfortable getting that involved? And how many health care organizations see that as the role of their physicians?
“Pain and Suffering” was first published December 9th, 2013 at http://acountrydoctorwrites.wordpress.com/2013/12/09/pain-and-suffering/. It is reposted here with permission.
“A Country Doctor” is a family physician who blogs at A Country Doctor Writes:. He has been practicing small town medicine for over twenty years and seeing three or four generations of many families has given him a perspective fewer and fewer physicians have today. Years ago he would write about medical topics and the practice of medicine in his local weekly paper, and now he am doing the same thing online. “Progress Notes” refers to the daily or occasional entries a physician makes in a patient’s medical record on the progress of a case. In this case, the progress may be his or the patient’s. All names and specifics have been changed for privacy reasons.
2Ascribe Inc. is a medical transcription services agency located in Toronto, Ontario Canada, providing medical transcription services to physicians, clinics and other healthcare providers across Canada. Having recently introduced WEBscribe, a client interface portal for document management, 2Ascribe continues to implement and develop technology to assist and improve the transcription process for physicians and other healthcare providers, for dictations by telephone or digital recorder. As a service to our clients and the healthcare industry, 2Ascribe offers articles of interest to physicians and other healthcare professionals, medical transcriptionists and office staff, as well as of general interest. Additional articles may be found at https://www.2ascribe.com.
