Over the holidays I played one of those “what if” games with my family. You know the kind. If you won a million dollars, what would you do? If you could do one of the following things without fear, which would you choose: climb Mount Everest, ski through the Swiss alps, or sky dive. f you had to lose one of your senses, which would it be.

That last one really made me think. At first I limited myself to choosing among the traditional five senses: sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste. But as I thought about this dilemma, I realized that for me there is a sixth sense--pain.

I work with pain patients. I know how debilitating pain can be. Pain, I said. I choose to lose pain.

It sounds ideal doesn’t it? If you had a pain free life, imagine all the things you could do without discomfort or fear. If you weren’t worried about experiencing pain, you probably would do a lot of things that would otherwise downright scare you. For that reason it turns out that the absence of pain isn’t such a good thing.

Have you heard about those special people who can’t feel pain. They’re born that way. It sounds ideal, doesn’t it? But the absence of pain doesn’t improve the quality of life, it does just the opposite. People who don’t feel pain have more accidents. They don’t notice when they are hurt so they continue doing things that damage their bodies. When they’re sick, they don’t notice. Infections can run rampant through their bodies because their brains don’t receive the signal that something is wrong. So not experiencing any pain is not necessarily a good thing.

Pain is a way of orienting ourselves to the dangers around us. When we experience pain, we know to watch out. To stop doing something. To protect ourselves.

Chronic pain usually begins as a signal that something is wrong. Unfortunately, at some point, and no one knows precisely why, that sense goes out of whack. Our nerves get caught in a wheel of pain that we can’t get out of. As an Interventional Pain Management physician my goal is to introduce something, whether through injections, medication, or other modalities to interrupt that cycle of pain.

We can never completely get rid of pain and we shouldn’t want to. We need that sixth sense so we know when something is wrong. But no one needs to live in a constant state of pain.

By the way, I don’t know what I would do with a million dollars, but I do know that someday I would like to ski in the Swiss alps or any alp. Which would you choose?

Tags: