Jesus never promised to relieve our pain

Pain is the attention-getting gift that nobody wants. Its signals and sensations alert us to unwelcome events or situations. Pain “plunges like a sword through creation,” writes Evelyn Underhill, suggesting that a certain amount of distress or discomfort is an unavoidable reality for all of us.

Although we may aim to give pain no more power than it deserves, it always engenders some kind of response. If we’re not paralyzed by pain, we’re usually motivated to do something about it. This could a mean a trip to the local pain clinic, which more properly might be called a pain management clinic, since medical professionals neither aspire to create pain nor always succeed in eliminating it. Opioid medications go a long way toward managing acute pain, though they’re far less effective in treating chronic pain. In fact, long-term use fosters a craving that converts easily into addiction and even overdose. Because opioids exert their influence in certain reward regions of the brain that allow us to perceive pleasure and well-being, they end up producing both analgesic and euphoric effects.

Fighting opioid addiction is an important battle to wage on several fronts, including those of public policy and public funding (see our editorial in this issue). New strategies for limiting “doctor shopping” and enhancing state and federal electronic databases would go a long way toward controlling access to these popular painkillers.