Pain is not a thing. It is a feeling. Feelings are the result of something. We feel pain when complex processes involving the nervous system, endocrine system and other biological systems are stimulated by trauma and disease.

Nevertheless we often talk about pain as a cause even though it is really an effect. We say that pain disrupts sleep, changes mood and disturbs memory. This seems an obvious thing to say and I have often said this myself. It follows from this kind of thinking that if we treat the pain everything else should get better.

The big problem is that modern medicine and alternative medicine aren’t very good at treating chronic pain. Although there are all kinds of studies showing some benefits of all kinds of treatments, overall, chronic pain continues to be a huge and costly problem. It seems that thinking about pain as a cause of a whole rafter of other problems hasn’t been that fruitful.

One could argue that doctors just haven’t found the exact source of pain in someone and that is why it is so difficult to treat that person’s pain. The reality is that science has spent years looking for sources and has wound up with many competing theories that try to localize a cause of chronic pain to one area of the body/mind or another. None are close to being proven.

Maybe we need to think differently, focusing on the fact that pain is an effect of processes set in motion by trauma and disease.  Perhaps problems with sleep, mood, concentration, memory, fatigue, digestion, elimination and other things that often occur with chronic pain are the result of the same or similar processes that lead to the feeling of pain.

This means that chronic pain and its associated symptoms may be part of a generalized response to trauma and disease. If this is true then we need to study that response very closely. A new way of thinking about chronic pain might lead us to better treatment. The old way seems to have led to a dead end.