No Pain, No Gain

Lessons from pain

- Smt. Priyamvada Waghmare

Recently we had with us an anaesthetist cum pain management expert from Melbourne, Dr. Rajeev Chawla. Apart from pain management, he spoke about the connection of physical to emotional and mental pain.

Dr. Chawla explained that the word 'pain' is derived from the word 'ponea', which means a penalty or a punishment and its connotation is always taken as something bad or wrong. So is pain really good or bad?

Pain has to be good because a no-pain situation could be very dangerous. Those not sensitive to pain or missing pain genes have a short life span. There is a clan in Pakistan where children don’t feel pain due to a missing pain gene and do all kind of dangerous stunts like walking on burning coals, running swords through their tongues or cheeks or knives through their hands. They make money showing these tricks but they never live beyond twenty-five.