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Why Don’t We Take Mental Pain as Seriously as We Take Physical Pain?
A psychiatrist explores cultural bias and the history of medicine
One of the first patients I saw in medical school was an elderly man dying of metastatic colon cancer, which had spread to his bones and was excruciatingly painful. I was shocked and heartbroken when I saw him beg the doctor for more pain medicine than the modest doses he was receiving. When I asked the attending physician if we could increase the dosage, I was told “no, he’d become an addict.” This was incorrect, illogical, and inhumane — as it turned out, the man died in agony. He would have never become an addict and even if he did, he had only weeks to live. If this had happened a few decades later, this same patient would be in hospice care receiving as much pain medicine as necessary. He would live out his remaining weeks with minimal pain.
Questions about treating severe pain began with the use of chloroform in the 1800s. Surgeons wondered if it would interfere with healing or if moral consequences, such as addiction, might…
