People with chronic pain may try very hard to figure out what’s causing their pain and they go through a lot of tests and imaging to find out the cause. What are your thoughts on that?
We have a wonderful technology these days in terms of MRIs, CT scans and nerve conduction studies which can give us a lot of information. However, I think that where we’ve gone wrong is that we’re trying to answer the question of “what is causing my pain?” because we seem to think that as soon as we find out what is causing the pain then we’ll be able to get rid of the pain and that’s a very, very tempting thought. So often times I’ll hear the patients say “Oh, nobody has been able to figure out why my shoulder is hurting but we’re going to do an MRI to find out what is causing my pain”. So it seems that if not the doctors then at least the patients are convinced that with these advanced imaging or testing techniques the smoking gun will be found and we’ll be able to pinpoint a cause. And unfortunately, that leads us down a path where we’re trying to find the smoking gun. However, because chronic pain is such a complex experience that is built up on many different dimensions, often the
