Do you often use pain killers? Then you might do yourself harm. The nature of pain is widely misunderstood, sometimes even within the medical profession.
The first you must realise, is that your body is speaking to you, it communicates important information to you about yourself. It is up to you to notice the signals and to understand them correctly. Some of them are easy. When you get sleepy, you need to sleep; when you get thirsty, you need hydration (to drink), etc. You interpret them instinctively and act accordingly. But for modern people who have lost much of their connection to nature, this is not always obvious.
Pain is such communication. It is not an inherently bad quality of a disease or an injury; it is a signal your body produces to alert you of something that is not well. If you take a pain killer, you will not get one iota better, you will just turn off the communication.
Pain can also control your body movements, or how you act. If, for instance, you put your hand in boiling water, it hurts, and you will quickly withdraw it. You will not even think of it, it just happens. That pain is not a bad quality of boiling water, it is your body telling you that the heat is too intense and you are about to get harmed. If you keep your hand in the water it would get burned and maybe destroyed; so your body tells you - forces you - to quickly remove your hand. You feel intense pain, you act accordingly, and you save your hand.
In a similar manner, pain signals are the primary means to stop us from using our bodies in ways that would harm us. If you bend, break or beat, there is always a limit to what your body can stand without getting harmed. Pain tells you where that limit is.
If you have an injury or had surgery, the pain can sometimes be so intense that you cannot sleep (which is important), and a pain killer can be necessary. It should always be used with sound judgement though.
Even during sleep we feel pain and adjust our movements or position to it. If you turn off the signals, you can choose a position that harms you, or in some way makes an injury worse.
In disease, pain is no less an important signal; pain killers should always be used sparingly, and only after serious consideration of possible consequences.
It is absolutely anathema to use pain killers routinely against pain whose cause is unknown. This is common practice within the medical profession, and it can lead to that serious health disorders remain undiscovered until it is too late to stop their advance.
Your body is talking to you and it falls on you to to learn to understand its language.
Copyright © 2020 Meleonymica/Mictorrani. All Rights Reserved.
More articles on health medicine can be found here.
You find all my writings on Read.Cash, sorted by topic, here.
Also, please join my community: The Mechanisms of Health (d52e).
I actually agree with you, but as always there are exceptions. My father had cancer, and now he's in a lot of pain again. If he wasn't on painkillers, he probably couldn't stand it. His body tells him that something is wrong, but it probably cannot be cured.