Freedom from Pain

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Vedanta Kesary, 1992 March, p.82-9

Which is the most common reason for seeing a doctor? What is the No. 1 reason people take medication? What disables or at least severely affects more people than either cancer or heart disease? What is it that has made a number of people all over the world consider even suicide as a rational alternative? The answer to all these questions is—PAIN.

Pain, said Albert Schweitzer, 'is a more terrible lord of mankind than even death himself.' And this 'lord' is, like death, a great democrat; he makes no distinctions. Pain is everybody's problem. No one is exempt from it. It comes to us in so many ways. There is pain when a finger is scorched by a flame, or the dentist's drill strikes close to a nerve, or a toe is stubbed on a rock. There is the pain of childbirth or surgery. There is the pain which frequently pays courtesy calls in the form of toothache, stomachache, headache, and backache. Generally all these produce only short-lived suffering which doctors simply call as 'acute pain' terrible, but of a short duration. Once it's over, we are free and usually we forget all about it.

But there is another type, no less terrible, which does not pass; it goes on and on and on, taking away our sleep and destroying our peace and happiness. This is 'chronic pain' and it afflicts legions in all parts of the world. A study conducted in USA nearly eight years ago revealed that there were in the US more than 36 million arthritics, 70 million with agonizing back pain, about 20 million who suffered from blinding migraines, and millions more who were racked by diseases like sciatica and gout. It was estimated that the pain associated with cancer, the most feared of all, afflicts about 8 million Americans and 18 million people worldwide. Researchers say that chronic pain disables more people than even cancer or heart diseases.

And yet, surprisingly enough, pain was, until recently, a neglected subject in modern medicine. A 1983 survey revealed that 17 standard textbooks on surgery, medicine and cancer had only 54 pages out of a total of 22,000 providing information about pain; half of the books did not discuss it at all. One problem is that there are relatively few known facts about pain to discuss. Another problem is that medical science seems still undecided as to which branch research on pain rightly ought to belong—anesthesiology, neurology or psychiatry. Naturally, pain-research has by and large remained neglected and underfunded.

About The Author

Swami Tyagananda

Swami Tyagananda is a monk of the Ramakrishna Order and presently head of the Ramakrishna Vedanta Society in Boston.