Skip to main content

Pain Treatment from Multiple Specialists' Points of View

What is pain? I personally asked myself this question time and again as I read the articles (specifically the Raheim, Crawford and Mowat articles). Of course, it is subjective. On a day when I have an excruciating headache, how does that compare to an individual who suffers from migraines? If we were both to rank our intensity of pain on a scale from 1-10, would an 8 mean the same thing for both of us? Seems relative to me.

Last summer I began intensely looking for answers, and hopefully subsequent relief, for chronic neck and back pain. A sports doctor, a pain management specialist, a deep-tissue massage therapist, a chiropractor/acupuncturist… Each of them asked me to fill out a packet (some a couple pages, other nearly 15). I became very familiar with the multi-view body illustration within the forms, on which I was asked to shade the areas of the body where I was feeling pain. I’m pretty sure each diagram (while a few key areas were always shaded) looked differently, depending on the day (which concerned me because I would think, "What if I'm not shading the center of all my problems?"). I was becoming desperate for relief, especially once feedback from the plethora of doctors/specialists started to have common themes… chronic pain and fibromyalgia.

So, sure, I was having more and more difficulty getting out of bed in the morning, I was regularly feeling exhausted, and my self-designated responsibilities at home with my family were becoming more and more stagnant. But, I refused to give into a diagnosis of fibromyalgia (apparently internal LOC). The reason was because, personally, that seemed like an easy way out. When it is not officially designated as a disease and there is no underlying cause or explanation for its occurrence, then, no, such an informal diagnosis was not acceptable to me. Like Ester in the Raheim article, I have days, or moments within the course of a day, where the pain and discomfort leaves me altogether. So, I begin deducing the situation to one that is more psychologically based. My way of dealing with stress or anxiety is taken out on my body physically through muscle spasms and overall tension. Allow that type of circumstance to last over a long period of time, and it becomes chronic.

The doctor or chiropractor would often ask me on a scale of 1 – 10, what was my pain that day. Well, depending on how I felt I was handling the pain that number would dramatically fluctuate. A rating of four one day, where I felt positive and had a good outlook, would sharply contrast to a rating of 7 or 8, where I felt hopeless, frustrated and exhausted. However, the actual pain level may, in fact, be relatively similar.

The point of me pouring over my ridiculous state of affairs is because, from a biomedical model approach, I am beginning to see that my interactions with the complex network of medical services in our community still leaves me feeling like my collective state goes unnoticed. Every professional understands their specialty, and so I am “treated” based on how to know to deal with me. Each visit with someone else starts at square one. Crawford’s examination of MPQ, and how it actually tries to provide some form of consistency across the medical professionals for the sake of the patient, offered a slight glimmer of hope. However, it’s hard to believe, for the sake of finding the best and holistic treatment among an un-unified team of medical professionals, that providing a cohesive and understood set of terms is going to lead to a more unified and, most importantly, personal approach to healing.

Popular posts from this blog

The whiteness of binaries that erase the Global South: On Communicative Inversions and the invitation to Vijay Prashad in Aotearoa

When I learned through my activist networks that the public intellectual Vijay Prashad was coming to Aotearoa, I was filled with joy. In my early years in the U.S., when learning the basics of the struggle against the fascist forces of Hindutva, I came in conversation with Vijay's work. Two of his critical interventions, the book, The Karma of Brown Folk , and the journal article " The protean forms of Yankee Hindutva " co-authored with Biju Matthew and published in Ethnic and Racial Studies shaped my early activism. These pieces of work are core readings in understanding the workings of Hindutva fascism and how it mobilizes cultural tropes to serve fascist agendas. Much later, I felt overjoyed learning about his West Bengal roots and his actual commitment to the politics of the Left, reflected in the organising of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), a political register that shaped much of my earliest lessons around Global South resistance, collectivization, and orga...
Read more

Upper caste Indian women in the diaspora, DEI, and the politics of hate

Figure 1: Trump, Vance and their partners responding to the remarks by Mariann Edgar Budde   Emergent from the struggles of the civil rights movement , led by African Americans , organized against the oppressive history of settler colonialism and slavery that forms the backbone of US society, structures around diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) formed an integral role in forging spaces for diverse recognition and representation.  These struggles around affirmative action, diversity, equity and inclusion were at the heart of the changes to white only immigration policies, building pathways for migration of diverse peoples from the Global South.  The changes to the immigration policies created opportunities for Indians to migrate to the US, with a rise of Indian immigration into the US since the 1970s into educational institutions, research and development infrastructures, and technology-finance infrastructures. These migratory structures into the US were leveraged by l...
Read more

Whiteness, NCA, and Distinguished Scholars

In a post made in response to the changes to how my discipline operates made by the Executive Committee of the largest organization of the discipline, the National Communication Association (NCA), one of the editors of a disciplinary journal Rhetoric and Public Affairs (RPA), Professor Martin J. Medhurst, a Distinguished Scholar of the discipline, calls out what he sees as the threat of identity (see below for his full piece published in the journal that he has edited for 20+ years, with 2019 SJR score of 0.27). In what he notes is a threat to the "scholarly merit" of the discipline, Professor Medhurst sets up a caricature of what he calls "identity." In his rhetorical construction of the struggles the NCA has faced over the years to find Distinguished Scholars of colour, he shares with us the facts. So let's look at the facts presented by this rhetor. It turns out, as a member of the Distinguished Scholar community of the NCA, Mr. Medhurst has problems wit...
Read more