Drop Dead Healthy by A. Jacobs (books to read to increase intelligence .TXT) 📕

It’s only partially fringe. So what’s wrong with a little happily-ever-after, especially if it’s got a little cutting-edge medical theory behind it?

Chapter 8

The Nervous System

The Quest to Hurt Less

I HURT MY SHOULDER the other day. I hurt it while lugging a sheet of drywall out of my apartment. At least that’s what I tell people. Because I don’t want to hear their sass when I tell them the truth. Which is that I hurt my shoulder kayaking. On Wii.

Yes, smirk if you must. Go ahead and marvel at my athletic ineptitude. It wasn’t even a manly video game like Wii football or Wii rugby. It was recreational boating. But listen, I was paddling hard, trying to get a real calorie-burning workout, swerving around the yellow buoys, and, well, the damn Wii remote has no resistance. So I strained my shoulder. And let me add, I’m far from the only Wii victim. A simple Google search reveals dozens of articles on the problem, including one written by an orthopedic surgeon who recommends pre-Wii stretching.

And, in case it helps my cause, the shoulder is an easy part of

the human body to injure. It’s a ball-and-socket joint, meaning it’s got the widest range of motion, and the most chances for muscles, tendons, and ligaments to get tugged in the wrong way.

My shoulder injury has prompted me to devote this month to researching—and ridding myself of—pain. The first lesson: Thank God I was born in the age of painkillers. The majority of Americans are accustomed to living relatively pain-free lives most of the time. This situation hasn’t been the case for most of human history. Pain has long been our constant, horrible companion.

Just contemplate the awful spectacle of surgery without anesthesia. If you read the absorbing book The Pain Chronicles by Melanie Thernstrom, you learn that doctors refused to tell their patients what day surgery was scheduled for. They simply showed up at the patient’s house on a random Tuesday or Thursday for a surprise operation. Otherwise, the patients would commit suicide the night before. It was that bad.

Thernstrom quotes Fanny Burney, a British novelist who had a mastectomy in 1810 (performed, incidentally, by Napoleon’s chief surgeon). Burney gave us the most vivid surviving description of predrug surgery. You might need anesthesia to read it:

[It was] a terror that surpasses all description . . . when the dreadful steel was plunged into the breast—cutting through veins, arteries, flesh, nerves . . . I began a scream that lasted unintermittingly during the whole time of the incision, and I almost marvel that it rings not in my ears still! . . . When the wound was made and the instrument withdrawn, the pain seemed undiminished, for the air that suddenly rushed into those delicate parts felt like a mass of minute but sharp poniards . . . when again I felt the instrument, describing a curve, cutting against the grain, while the flesh resisted in a manner so forcible as to oppose and tire the hand, then, indeed, I thought I must have expired.

Even after anesthesia was invented, it wasn’t always used. Suffering, you see, was natural. When I wrote my book on the Bible, I read about the bizarre nineteenth-century controversy over women giving birth under anesthesia. Some felt it violated God’s commandment “Women will give birth in pain.”

Nowadays, pain has receded from our lives a bit. But we have a long way to go. Chronic pain—meaning pain that lasts several months—afflicts 70 million Americans at a cost of $100 billion to the economy, according to a study by the National Institutes of Health Pain Research Consortium. We haven’t yet found a suitable treatment for chronic pain. Pills sometimes work—but they tend to be addictive.

Reading about pain, I’m reminded, once again, that I want a refund on my body. Everybody should get one. Send this fleshy bag of bones and muscles back to the factory!

I’m not saying the body isn’t amazing in many ways. It is. I could marvel for days at the design of the ear, and how it converts puffs of air into a Haydn concerto.

But at the same time, the body has many deeply embedded bugs. We’re the result of ad hoc evolution and outdated hardware. And pain is one of the cruelest, most primal systems.

Pain is so unsubtle. Couldn’t evolution have found a better way to alert us that we stubbed our toe? Rather than this sensation that makes us curse the day our mom and dad met at the college cafeteria? What about just having the toe throb gently? Or turn green? Or play a little ragtime number? I’d pay attention. I swear.

Pain is annoying and unnecessary, like getting an e-mail in all caps. It’s like a six-year-old who alerts you every fifteen seconds that he wants Hungry Hungry Hippos for his birthday. Yes, I understand. Message received.

Maybe when we were slugs, we needed pain’s brutish alarm system to pay attention. But now that we have cerebral cortices, pain should have been phased out.

Not to mention that pain is ridiculously unreliable. Thernstrom describes this problem with a wonderful metaphor. Think of pain as a guard in a watchtower. He rings the bell when he sees enemies. Problem is, the guard is “erratic, lazy, easily confused, fearful, a poor multitasker, and sometimes just deluded.” Sometimes he’ll ring the bell for no reason. Sometimes he keeps ringing the bell long after the enemies have been killed.

Pain can erupt with no cause, linger for years, even appear in a phantom limb. And here’s one of pain’s most sadistic qualities: If you suffer from chronic pain, it often doesn’t ebb as the body heals. It often gets worse. Pain begets pain. The neural pathways become smoother, the message stronger. It’s a positive feedback loop that serves only to increase our misery.

Sharp Relief

My shoulder pain has gotten bad enough that I’ll try anything to cure it. My general practitioner taught me some physical therapy exercises, which I do