Pain as metaphor: metaphor and medicine.
Like many other disciplines, medicine often resorts to metaphor in order to explain complicated concepts that are imperfectly understood. But what happens when medicine's metaphors close off thinking, restricting interpretations and opinions to those of the negative kind? This paper considers the deleterious effects of destructive metaphors that cluster around pain. First, the metaphoric basis of all knowledge is introduced. Next, a particular subset of medical metaphors in the domain of neurology (doors/keys/wires) are shown to encourage mechanistic thinking. Because schematics are often used in medical textbooks to simplify the complex, this paper traces the visual metaphors implied in such schematics. Mechanistic-metaphorical thinking results in the accumulation of vast amounts of data through experimentation, but this paper asks what the real value of the information is since patients can generally only expect modest benefits--or none at all--for relief from chronic pain conditions. Elucidation of mechanism through careful experimentation creates an illusion of vast medical knowledge that, to a significant degree, is metaphor-based. This paper argues that for pain outcomes to change, our metaphors must change first.
['Neilson|Shane|S|']
D000339:Affect D001921:Brain D004644:Emotions D005149:Facial Expression D006801:Humans D019365:Metaphor D009619:Nociceptors D010146:Pain D010147:Pain Measurement D058748:Pain Perception D013315:Stress, Psychological D009626:Terminology as Topic D013850:Thinking
Anaesthesia Pain management