Pain in Men Wounded in Battle
One article on PainSci cites Beecher 1946: Pain is Weird
PainSci notes on Beecher 1946:
Dr. Henry Beecher is most famous for an anecdote about treating wounded soldiers with a placebo when he ran out of morphine… which probably never happened (see Jarry). He is also famous for this classic paper, published immediately after WW II, in which he reports that most soldiers wounded in combat had so little pain that they didn’t want morphine. He hypothesized that trauma in the civilian is highly disruptive to their livelihood and causes them to focus on and feel the pain more acutely. In contrast, for the soldier, a serious injury represents deliverance from a terrifying situation — and the euphoria of this blunts the pain.
That idea remains well-supported in broad strokes by modern pain science, but it would be quite interesting to ask if it has ever been more rigorously validated.
This page is part of the PainScience BIBLIOGRAPHY, which contains plain language summaries of thousands of scientific papers & others sources. It’s like a highly specialized blog. A few highlights:
- Cannabidiol (CBD) products for pain: ineffective, expensive, and with potential harms. Moore 2023 J Pain.
- Inciting events associated with lumbar disc herniation. Suri 2010 Spine J.
- Prediction of an extruded fragment in lumbar disc patients from clinical presentations. Pople 1994 Spine (Phila Pa 1976).
- Characteristics of patients with low back and leg pain seeking treatment in primary care: baseline results from the ATLAS cohort study. Konstantinou 2015 BMC Musculoskelet Disord.
- Effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of universal school-based mindfulness training compared with normal school provision in reducing risk of mental health problems and promoting well-being in adolescence: the MYRIAD cluster randomised controlled trial. Kuyken 2022 Evid Based Ment Health.