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:
- Exercise and education versus saline injections for knee osteoarthritis: a randomised controlled equivalence trial. Bandak 2022 Ann Rheum Dis.
- Association of Lumbar MRI Findings with Current and Future Back Pain in a Population-based Cohort Study. Kasch 2022 Spine (Phila Pa 1976).
- A double-blinded randomised controlled study of the value of sequential intravenous and oral magnesium therapy in patients with chronic low back pain with a neuropathic component. Yousef 2013 Anaesthesia.
- Is Neck Posture Subgroup in Late Adolescence a Risk Factor for Persistent Neck Pain in Young Adults? A Prospective Study. Richards 2021 Phys Ther.
- Sudden amnesia resulting in pain relief: the relationship between memory and pain. Choi 2007 Pain.