By Rebecca Davis O’Brien | The Atlantic | August 18, 2014
“Pain has become our fifth vital sign.” Speaking last fall at a New Jersey symposium on pain management called “Do No Harm,” the chairman of emergency services at Hackensack University Medical Center said what his audience of doctors and nurses hardly needed to be told. We are all familiar with the medical routine: The thermometer beeps, the blood pressure gauge sighs, breaths and pulse are recorded—and then we’re asked, these days, how much it hurts on a scale of one to 10. Pain didn’t get there on its own. In fact, the speaker was borrowing a line from the American Pain Society, a patient-advocacy group whose research is supported by pharmaceutical companies. “In a certain way,” he confessed, “we have created our own monster.”
The speaker was referring to the nationwide surge in prescription drug addiction, particularly opioid painkillers, which now kill nearly 17,000 Americans per year. That represents a four-fold increase over the past decade. In 2012, New Jersey saw roughly 800 opiate-related overdose deaths, according to the state medical examiner, nearly half of which involved heroin, a drug that has lately made a resurgence in the Northeast, particularly among young adults. Their stories usually begin with opioid painkillers prescribed for an injury or operation, shared by friends, or taken from the family medicine cabinet. Too many of their stories end alone, at home, with a needle in the arm, after years of cycling in and out of rehabilitation facilities, jails, and hospitals.
But the symposium called attention to a dilemma facing clinicians and American society at large—one that has unfolded in conference rooms, statehouses, and courts. The day’s roster of speakers, all men in suits, sat in the front row. In addition to the ER chief, the state medical examiner and another doctor, there were several current or former Drug Enforcement Administration officials, the head of the state’s Division of Consumer Affairs, a malpractice lawyer, the state’s first assistant attorney general, an adviser from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and a representative from Actavis, a pharmaceutical company. The U.S. Attorney for New Jersey showed up as well, warning of society’s “cavalier” attitude toward prescription drugs and vowing to prosecute unscrupulous doctors. The only woman on the panel, a suburban mother whose young adult son died of a heroin overdose, sat toward the back of the room.
There was no mistaking the focus of the day: thorny legal issues rather than lessons in care. If the audience came expecting guidance in the clinical management of pain, they went away disappointed. Who gets to measure suffering? Who draws the line between legitimate relief and drug abuse? Was it the pharmaceutical rep, who told the group that “100 million Americans suffer from chronic pain” (an industry statistic often invoked, but seldom explained)? The state officials, who threatened to revoke physicians’ licenses? The doctors, who urged caution, or the lawyers, who warned of malpractice suits? Or was it the mother, who tearfully recounted her son’s progression from legal painkillers to heroin?
Physical pain is not merely a private struggle. Pain is also a problem of representation and trust, of rights and responsibilities, and a source of tension between individual and community. Perhaps not surprisingly, efforts to manage it give rise to a chronic American condition: an intimate, unknowable experience co-opted by special interests. Pain, in short, is political.
That is the argument Keith Wailoo, a Princeton historian of medicine and public policy scholar, makes in Pain: A Political History, which sets out to show “how the powerful question of other people’s pain became a recurring site for political battle.” Wailoo’s account begins with the post-World War II challenge of caring for disabled veterans, and proceeds through conflicts over entitlement programs, “fetal pain,” euthanasia, and the rise of OxyContin. Wailoo identifies pain as the impetus, and often proxy, for debates—played out in courtrooms as much as in doctors’ offices—about not just health care, but government regulation, business, constitutional rights, and the American character.
