The words we use to talk about pain

Are you a ‘pain sufferer’? A ‘pain warrior’? A ‘pain victim’? Do you ‘ache’ or is it a ‘stabbing’ pain? Do you even know what ‘lancinating’ means? And let’s add in: are you a ‘catastrophiser’? Has your pain been developed through ‘chronification’? Is your body ‘unbalanced’ or ‘asymmetrical’? Do you ‘comply’ or ‘adhere’? Are you ‘motivated’? The ways we talk about pain are weird! We blithely use words, us clinicians and researchers (and yes, people with pain) without perhaps, really coming to grips with what the words mean – or what they say. One of the themes in qualitative pain research is the idea of ‘pain as indescribable’ – pain is invisible and can’t be put into words (Munday, et al., 2021) and yet as clinicians we’re constantly trying to find out ‘what it feels like’ and ‘how much it hurts’. So people with pain (and clinicians) turn to metaphors and by using metaphors attempt to bridge the gap between something known and the unknown/indescribable. The language and phrases we all use reveal some uncomfortable attitudes. There have been many, many papers discussing the ‘battleground’ metaphor in medicine (e.g. Kirmayere, 2008; Loftus, 2011; Neilson, 2016). The ‘war against’ [disease of the time] has apparently been use...
Source: HealthSkills Weblog - Category: Anesthesiology Authors: Tags: Assessment Chronic pain Clinical reasoning Professional topics Resilience/Health Science in practice biopsychosocial healthcare Source Type: blogs