After writing the first and second blog, today I am going to initiate my #101healthcare project. If you ever wonder why I choose the topic “daily struggle” as my very first blog, it is because life can never be separated with struggles or pain or sufferings (I am in pain every single day!). It is crucial for us to discuss about our struggles. I have been providing healthcare services for almost five years now (not including the 5 years in medical school). To speak the truth, it is abstruse to decipher health and healthcare. As a healthcare provider, our ultimate goal is to provide a quality healthcare service that can guide us all in cultivating and attaining a healthy state. This is definitely not as simple as the statistics shown on the most renowned journal or even the reports that the doctors provide you. Hence, I wanted to start this blog as well as the #101healthcare project, to allow us to critically discuss about life, health and healthcare in multi-layer and in multiple context. I am grateful to my patients, my friends and family who have helped me throughout the years. With their active engagements, long conversations and endless of knowledge exchange, I manage to come up with this end-product, #101healthcare project. By the end, I wish to have an extensive collection on these topics.
This project is not only helpful to the healthcare providers, but also to those who are seeking to understand about life, the meaning of life or even death and dying. Of course, I strongly believe that at the end, this project is also going to be beneficial in various ways to many others from all walks of life.
Without further ado, let’s move to the first topic for this project. It is no other than the topic: PAIN! Pain has always been a widely discussed topic, as it constitutes parts of our lives. It is almost inevitable no matter how one tries to avoid it. From the labouring pain (the birth), the growing (changing teeth, menstruation cycle, menopause) whether as a biological process or a pathological process, the suffering from disappointment, fear, trauma, frustration, irritation, or even death, almost any thing that could be part of our life is inextricably linked to pain. Hence, the understanding of it becomes crucial to us, so that we can raise awareness on the complexity and ambiguity of pain can be. We must be aware that pain is not as simply as a pure pathological process, it is rather an experience, a process of memory creation. If there is no such foundation of memory that we can or could hold on, then it is in fact, no pain can exist. Even an instant, temporary pain that we feel, like a pinch, it contains a muscle memory. However, such short-term pain is not as devastating as a permanent pain that contains the memory that stays in our every single cell. It is then important to discuss the space and medium of the pain-memory.
This photo is showing a man being locked up in a jail. But why this man was drinking? Why most of us would prefer to use drugs or alcohols or anything to numb ourselves from whatever we are experienced as unpleasant (i.e. pain)? So, what are the reasons for him to be drunk during his work? What is behind alcoholism? Is it useful to have a 'prison' system through medical perspective? Would it cause more pain to this individual? Maybe these are the questions that we should have asked... -- Miaw
So before discussing about pain-memory, I propose that pain-memory is a form of silent language. Like how all of us learn a new language, we need memory to help understanding and learning the language. Similarly, a pain-memory works the same. However, there is a rather unique and distinctive feature of pain-memory, which is the use of such language in our body to be a defence mechanism. This would definitely be an interesting topic, however, due to the word and time limitation, we would only further discuss this if you are interested. Such pain-memory is not just a powerful tool for communication in a defence mechanism, but it is also having the ability to the making and unmaking of the world of the individual. It is almost the same as how a story-telling work, or the analogy of reading or writing to the reality. Thus, the language of pain-memory can shape the world, or the world can shape this language, vice versa (If you are interested in this, I would recommend you to read the amazing works by Elaine Scarry and JE Jackson). Understanding this language of pain-memory can help us to understand its roles and its existence. Instead of doing what the current main stream of the research, especially the medical research, to focus only to eliminate them as to stereotyping pain-memory as something evil or unnecessary. I am not implying here that pain-memory is something fun, but rather, I have to stress that pain-memory is just like any other languages, it is neutral. It is part of our life, or maybe even more than just part of life. It has so much to play in an individual, family and community than one can imagine.
In summary, one may perhaps say it is the pain that silences the language; or is it our language that silences our pain? Often, it is not possible to say which has caused which, or which has influenced which. However, what clearly shows here is that this language of pain is essentially "silent". Reasons lying behind pain are messages seeking to be conveyed. The torture may be implicit or explicit, the moaning can be loud or soft, but pain-memory is often rather muted by the political-economic, the social, or any form of invisible power that exists within the individual, between individuals, or among the community, even with Mother Nature.
-- Pain as Silent Language. Written by Sim Miaw Ler (11th March 2020)
No matter where you are, no matter what background you are from, I would love to hear from you. If to use a line to describe what is the most painful memory you have in your life, what will it be? Leave a comment below and share with us about your story!
The next two topics that I am going to discuss are
Pain (3): How Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) understands pain.
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