Pain in Men Wounded in Battle
One page 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:
- Placebo analgesia in physical and psychological interventions: Systematic review and meta-analysis of three-armed trials. Hohenschurz-Schmidt 2024 Eur J Pain.
- Recovery trajectories in common musculoskeletal complaints by diagnosis contra prognostic phenotypes. Aasdahl 2021 BMC Musculoskelet Disord.
- Cannabidiol (CBD) products for pain: ineffective, expensive, and with potential harms. Moore 2023 J Pain.
- Moderators of the effect of therapeutic exercise for knee and hip osteoarthritis: a systematic review and individual participant data meta-analysis. Holden 2023 The Lancet Rheumatology.
- Inciting events associated with lumbar disc herniation. Suri 2010 Spine J.