We are consumers of pain. Our labor produces more of it. It is stolen and sold back to us. The pain of people in other c

We seek out experts to translate our pain to us. Experts use blood tests and imaging to tell us what our bodies are already telling us. These stories are well known and rational. They have treatments but no cures. These stories are supposed to have endings — happy endings. But the body keeps telling us and nothing will shut it up. Sometimes it tells us to death.

There are no words for pain because pain itself is a form of communication: the body trying to tell the self/consciousness something urgent. It can’t be communicated because it already is communication, but in the words and grammar of the body, which can’t be translated—or maybe we have forgotten how.

The chronic monthly pain of menstrual cramps is ignored, or worse, by physicians. Despite my diagnosis of endometriosis and two laparoscopic surgeries that did nothing but verify my diagnosis, neither my OB-GYN nor my general practitioner will prescribe pain medication for menstrual pain. Is this where my body learned to do pain so well? So well it can’t stop? Why would you stop doing something you were so good at? My body is a pain expert. My body is a pain machine.

If pain is another sense, then there must be a pain organ that can be located. That organ seems to be the brain; although sometimes I am sure that the pain organ is outside me, somewhere I can’t see. The pain organ is out there, sensing things I cannot, sending me overwhelming, terrible signals I can’t interpret or understand. The pain organ is not just in the body, but in the culture, the media, the economy. The pain organ tells us what pain is, what is painful, how to be in pain.

Patients on medical TV shows are not human. Patients are there only as a mystery to be solved by torturing them with invasive, violent “tests” (House) or as lessons for doctors to learn (Grey’s Anatomy). House’s constant refrain, “Patients lie,” seems to be the overarching narrative for medicine. Only patient bodies, divorced from their messy selves, probed by instruments, translated by physicians, can reveal the “truth,” and only via physician expertise. No one ever asks if the physician might be lying.

All of this assumes that what we understand as “healthy” is normal. That normal is normal. Without normal, illness doesn’t exist. Without the blank slate of no pain as a starting point, pain is meaningless. But of course, it could be the other way around: Pain is the only meaningful communication, and we are taught to ignore it.

The thing I’ve discovered since finding out I have an endocrine disorder is that the body doesn’t work at all the way we’re told it does. That story of cells and organs telling other organs what to do and when (like little individuals making rational economic choices) is fiction. These systems (glands in the endocrine system, the brain, etc.) are all entangled in feedback loops. The pituitary does its thing, making the proteins, hormones, enzymes, and other chemicals it makes with what’s available. Those chemicals are then taken up by other glands that make their own things. If there’s too much of one thing, the other gland will make more of whatever it makes because it has more stuff to make it with, or sometimes this will indicate a threshold and it will make another chemical that another gland uses to make a chemical that causes another gland to make less of something else.

The world of medicine clings to this story of cells and organs—even when our bodies are telling us that pain and chronic disease extends far beyond the body into food, culture, environment, politics, work. The coronavirus pandemic has made this an obvious reality. The coronavirus pandemic has made this truth an emergency.

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es great responsibility. Healthy/ethical marketplaces are places where trust is fostered between the platform or venue, and their suppliers and customers. As marketplaces came online the transparency that encouraged trust disappeared and we’re starting to see modern marketplaces break faith. These platforms should not be using their position of power to force their agenda, instead, applying the model of supporting existing suppliers and improving customer experience to drive success.

What I know from my own pain is that this story we have been telling ourselves about our bodies and how they work and don’t work is not true. If you’ve read Foucault, you know that medicine is a way of looking at and understanding and controlling bodies. Medicine makes its own knowledge or stories about how bodies work, how they don’t work, and how to make them work again in a way that is productive. These stories are usually very linear, very straightforward, rational: Something happened to you/you did something > body is damaged > diagnose cause of damage > treat disease/damage with some chemical, surgery, or treatment > cure.

No cell or gland is sitting in the body sending out orders to other glands to make more or less. There is no hierarchy. There are just entangled systems interacting. We can affect these systems indirectly by putting different things in our bodies (food, supplements, drugs, exercise, toxins, poisons), but when you’re dealing with entangled systems, there is no straightforward way to fix anything.

When you are in pain, you are no longer the subject; you are the object. Pain makes us objects and unreliable narrators. But this isn’t a truth; it’s a construct. Someone benefits. Someone profits. This is the pain economy.

There is research for imaging pain, making it something that can be seen by others, but why would we need this if doctors believed patients? If we believed everyone who told us they were in pain. The idea that people with addiction are not in pain but simply pill-seeking is incredible. A person can be seeking pills, can be an addict, and also be in ferocious, world-ending pain. Many studies show that addicts are addicts because they’re treating pain with whatever they can find: social pain, physical pain, psychological pain.

I have chronic pain and a chronic illness. I actually have several chronic illnesses (celiac disease, Addison’s disease, endometriosis), but the “underlying cause” is still undiagnosed, so my pain is questioned, interrogated.

To talk about pain, we have to refer to some other pain — one that is easy to picture and usually involves a tool or weapon, like a knife, axe, or hammer. To talk about pain, we have to distance ourselves from it, separate via violence. Pain is happening to us rather than something our bodies are doing.