[Nasional-e] Instruments of pain

Mon Nov 11 09:48:05 2002

Instruments of pain

You have to love scientists. Diligently they toil away at their abstruse
projects, oblivious to such important issues as war and peace and terrorism
and who's going to win the Kyushu Basho. We pay them next to nothing, ignore
their pointy-headed little reports and cheer them on only when they score
the occasional Nobel Prize for work that nobody understands, thus making the
whole country look more intelligent. But once in a while they come up with a
winner, something we can not only grasp right away but can even imagine
putting to good use in our own lives.

Such was the finding by a group of German researchers, presented last week
at a Florida neuroscience conference, that people who suffer chronic pain
actually feel worse -- and complain more, too -- when their spouses comfort
them than they do when they're ignored. Distract or neglect the sufferer,
and he (or maybe even she) will literally feel less pain. Mollycoddle him,
and he'll writhe all the more. "I am fascinated by this," responded one
California scientist, described in news reports as an expert in "the
neurobiology of pain."

Well, we should think so. It doesn't take a pain neurobiologist to see that
this announcement is fascinating on a number of levels.

First, it tells us a great deal about the everyday lives of German research
scientists. As a species, they clearly don't have enough to do, and their
domestic lives are no picnic, either. How else would they have dreamed up
their breakthrough experiment if some or all of them had not been saddled
with petulant back patients for spouses and had not had too much time on
their hands in the lab? Probably they hung out there a lot as a way of
avoiding the pain-ridden spouse at home.

Then one of them noticed that, lo! whenever he or she left the room, the
afflicted spouse complained much less. Most people might have thought this
was because, having left, the researcher could no longer hear the spouse.
But most people are not German research scientists. If they were, they not
only would have left well enough alone; they also would have asked
themselves whether this might mean that the invalid actually felt less pain?

This leads to the second fascinating aspect of the story: the experiment
itself. What, you ask, did the researchers actually do? Simple. They
assembled 20 obviously unsuspecting couples, in each of which one partner
suffered from chronic back pain. Ten patients described their spouses as
solicitous and loving during bad pain bouts; the other 10 said their spouses
typically changed the subject or left the room when things got bad. The
researchers then administered "painful electric shocks" to the patients'
aching backs in the presence of their spouses and monitored their resulting
brain activity to measure how much pain they felt.

It would be nice to read that the patients then rose up as one from their
gurneys and administered painful blows to the researchers, but that didn't
happen. They lay there, stunned, while the researchers coldly observed that
those with doting spouses present experienced almost three times more pain
than those who were accompanied by their indifferent spouses.

Just to head off nitpicking questions about whether neglect might be a
useful treatment for any pain, not just the chronic kind, the scientists
then zapped the unfortunate patients in the finger. To their torturers' mild
surprise, all 20 found this to be equally painful, no matter what kind of
spouses they had. So don't tell your children to grin and bear it when they
come running home with their cuts and bruises. It won't help.

Not to worry. There is plenty of new information here we can usefully apply.
The neuroscientists in Florida spoke eloquently about the advantage of
knowing that "a social variable" (techno-speak for the presence of a spouse)
can influence the brain's response to pain. The public knows better. The
advantage lies in knowing that if our spouses fall victim to chronic pain,
it is not just permissible, it is our medical duty, to ignore them when they
whine and to walk out on them if they keep it up. If we don't, we will be
guilty of "enabling" their pain. If, on the other hand, we are ourselves in
pain, we now know exactly what to do to feel better: Tell those hovering,
hand-wringing ninnies to go away and leave us alone. The relief that has
thus been made available to all parties could be instrumental in saving
numerous shaky marriages from Florida to Fukuoka.

There's a bonus, too. Should a recalcitrant spouse fail to cooperate at any
time, we can feel quite justified in stabbing him or her in the finger. It's
known as the scientific method.