Stop Saying "Pain Can't Hurt You".
Hurting is the literal purpose of pain.
The point of pain is to hurt to cause a strong negative physical feeling that alerts your body to harm and trains you to avoid this in the future. While not all pain serves this purpose equally well, the key fact is that the point of pain is to hurt you. This is how we define pain. If a sensation did not hurt you it would not be a pain.
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Chronic pain can be deadly.
People with chronic pain are 300% more likely to commit suicide controlling for other social factors. This is a direct example of chronic pain physically hurting people.
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Fear of pain is innate and rational.
The fear of pain is not an acquired fear that can or should be corrected. Fear of pain comes from a deep bodily instinct to protect ourselves from damage. Pain is the body's signal of damage and fearing pain is a necessary part of self-preservation.
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Why does this phrase persist?
This phrase is meant by doctors to be reassuring. To let patients know that the pain they are experiencing is not linked to deadly outcomes. This is a good intention, but the result is dismissal and minimization of one of the most debilitating and quality of life-destroying parts of chronic illness.
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It isn't causing damage.
A better way of phrasing this for doctors would be "This pain isn't causing damage" or "Don't worry this pain is not damaging your body long term." This would better communicate why the patient should be reassured without minimizing the pain itself.
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Accepting Chronic Pain
Another place the phrase shows up is mental health practitioners trying to help patients accept and live with chronic pain. But in this case, the first step for the therapist must always be acknowledging and affirming the patient's experience, something "pain can't hurt you" undermines.
A phrase like "the harm of this pain is what you feel, not what you fear" is one alternative, that both acknowledges the physical suffering but also emphasizes the need to control fear and not fixate on pain.
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The importance of recognizing patient pain.
Whether a mental or physical healthcare provider the most important thing you can do is acknowledge a patient's pain and that it does hurt them. The exact opposite of "the pain can't hurt you." Only once you acknowledge pain can you help a patient deal with it. Otherwise, you are not helping to process a problem, you are ignoring it and gaslighting your patient.
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Pain hurts people. Water is wet. The sky is blue. Let's stop denying reality, please.
Chronic pain patients are often told by doctors that "pain can't hurt you." This statement is utter nonsense. Even if they said "pain can't kill you" it would be false.
Not only is this phrase false and undermining as outlined above, this attitude has real consequences for chronic pain patients. The idea that pain is a harmless symptom enforces the idea that people who seek opioid medication must be addicted and/or that doctors are justified in denying medication because addiction can be deadly but "pain can't hurt you."
To be clear, addiction is a disease and should be treated. But we should not place the lives of one patient group over the lives of another. That is how we got into the Opioid Crisis in the first place, the answer is not simply to completely flip the table it is to treat patients according to their actual needs. Give addicts the help and support to control their addiction AND give chronic pain patients the pain relief to control their pain.
This affects non-opioid pain relief as well. Medical Cannabis is almost never covered by any form of insurance. Why? Because if "pain can't hurt you" then pain relief is a luxury item.
But pain relief is NOT a luxury item. It is a medical necessity. We don't consider anti-depressants a luxury item, they are covered by insurance. By the logic of "pain can't hurt you" depression can't hurt you either. But we understand that dangerously low mental health is deadly. We understand that depression kills. When will we understand that pain kills?
I do not want to dismiss mental health support for chronic pain patients. meditation and mindfulness can have real benefits to chronic pain. But that has no effect on the cold hard fact that pain hurts people and that denying people well-established relief is torture.
If you are in pain right now know this: Your pain is real. You deserve pain relief. Your fear of further pain is rational. No matter what pathway you take with your pain, you are not weak, you are not overdramatic, and you are not a liar.
