When I was in medical school, it was hammered bluntly into our heads that pain is an important sign, so important that it should be considered the fifth vital sign. We need to treat pain, and we should be ashamed if we lacked the compassion to address pain. We were told that the likelihood of developing abuse was so paltry that it wasn't worth discussion. We were indoctrinated into a culture of pain control that was whimsical and optimistic and did not take any measure of reality.
Now, we are told that patient satisfaction is critical to excellent care and best practices. If you know an inpatient doctor who has never heard of HCAHPS, then that's one blissfully ignorant dude. And HCAHPS even has several questions that directly deal with pain. As if patient satisfaction has ever correlated with good medical care. It's a hospital, not the Ritz-Carlton.
But I think that we have a really poor understanding of pain. From both sides of the fence, people do not appreciate that pain is not simple. Pain is tremendously complicated and the factors that govern it are not easily appreciated. I pulled my back in the gym and actually passed out from the pain. I couldn't walk for two days. I didn't take anything because I knew that eventually, the pain would go away. But for my 50 year old patient who was abused as a child and raped as a teen, abused by her ex-husband and abandoned by her daughter, she has no such confidence that her back pain is going to get better, and guess what — it doesn't. And so pain meds make life just a tiny bit more bearable. Is that the appropriate goal of therapy? Is it okay that the pain meds are only there to make the day go by faster? I don't know what the right answer is.
