Word: painfully
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Real. Some people who evince little or no vocal or visible reaction when they are obviously hurt say they have a high threshold for pain. Many more, who do not try to suppress their feelings, admit to having a low threshold. There is no physiological evidence of any differences in the pain sensors and therefore in the basic pain sensations in these two groups. Whatever differences there are apparently exist entirely in the emotional reactions. These also vary with cultural attitudes. The stoicism of the American Indian and the Chinese is proverbial, although ethnic variations in sensitivity have not been...
...personality trait, regardless of culture, that most consistently accompanies exaggerated sensitivity to pain, says Sternbach, is neurotic anxiety. This is not the anxiety associated with a specific situation, such as an impending operation, but the persistent, seemingly baseless anxiety that often has its roots in the unconscious. From many observations, Sternbach concludes: "The quiet, brooding, anxious and resentful individual is the one who is most likely to have symptoms of pain and is least able to tolerate them." By contrast, victims of the more crippling emotional illnesses, the psychoses, are far less likely to complain of pain...
...pain exists without letup, says Neurosurgeon Benjamin L. Crue of the City of Hope, the chances are 10 to 1 that it is neurotic or at least psychogenic. "Organic pain doesn't work that way," says Crue. "It comes and goes, with a few exceptions such as some cases of cancer. Nearly all the rest of the pain that patients call 'constant' or 'unremitting' is psychological." This is not to say that such pain is not "real." Most medical authorities now agree with Sternbach, who says: "Excluding the malingerer, who by definition is a deliberate...
Stay the Knife. Technically, the total suppression of pain comes only with anesthesia, which cannot be prolonged. The lighter state of analgesia, or relief of pain without loss of consciousness, is far more difficult to achieve. For cancer patients with intractable pain of indisputably physical origin, neurosurgeons have devised a number of radical operations. One of the commonest, for pain anywhere below the neck, is cordotomy-literally, cutting the spinal cord-a remedy that is less drastic than it sounds. In the standard operation, the cord is exposed and a small cut is made in the nerve bundles controlling...
Many neurosurgeons would stay the knife if they could, and are joining with pharmacologists to develop better ways of relieving pain with drugs. As many as 65% of tic douloureux victims can be treated effectively, says Crue, with drugs originally designed to control epileptic seizures. For the relief of severe pain of virtually every kind, morphine and its synthetic analogues remain the most potent drugs known,* but all are highly addicting and need to be taken in stepped-up doses to maintain a constant level of analgesia. Supposedly nonaddicting substitutes are exultantly reported almost every year by research chemists...