Looking At Pain From A Different Perspective

After spending all morning yesterday tending to our dog's health care needs and because I need to spend all morning today dealing with a new doctor I thought I would republish a post from March 6 2012. This post is about a documentary I saw that highlighted how different cultures around the world deal with pain.

A New Perspective on Pain

Recently I watched a program on Netflix called Medicine Men Go Wild.

In this series of 4 episodes twin doctors from London go all over the world exploring medicine outside the traditional. The 2nd episode was of particular interest to me as it was all about pain.

The doctors went to a few different places where pain medications are not available and so are not used. It seems there was almost a cultural difference in the way these people approached pain. They seem to accept it and because of that it isn't as much of a bother to them.

Obviously they were talking about acute pain, not chronic pain and there certainly is a difference between the two. Never-the-less it got me thinking about pain, my pain. I've certainly had to adjust over the years to a certain level of pain because it's always present to some degree. These days it is only the really bad pain that gets much attention. Is this the same kind of thing? Is it possible, with time, the level of pain that I can adjust to will go up? Is it possible that in the future, with enough mediation and such, I could accept my migraines the way I accept the daily chores of life for example?

It would be interesting to see how these same groups of people cope with chronic pain within their communities and cultures.