Pain

RL, WH, AC, RS, DL, KS, WO, BK, JR, TW and MP: 11 patients today were pain patients. Back pain, head pain or leg pain is what they had. Except for one person with pain all over the place. There is a man in Worcester MA, Jon Kabbat-Zinn who runs the multi-disciplinary pain center. He teaches meditation. He believes that we should accept pain and welcome it. This relates to the process of labelling it as bad or good or neutral. We can have pain without suffering. People have made this distinction. The most famous time is in childbirth which is thought of as very painful. Generally, it isn't thought of as suffering. That's because the experience seems so meaningful that some people even "want" the pain component. They refuse analgesics.
I don't know what skill Kabbatt-Zinn has but I don't believe that I could get one of these patients to accept their chronic pain. I have some who would. These people just want it to go away. So we try with pills to make it better. Several of them are a great deal better, because we have such great medications. Several of them are not better. I wish that they could accept that they have pain and divorce it from suffering. It would be nice if I knew how to teach that.