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Why I left my tech job to work on chronic pain

(sailhealth.substack.com)
330 points glasscannon | 3 comments | 04 Jul 25 12:50 UTC | HN request time: 0.668s | source
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kianN ◴[04 Jul 25 14:59 UTC] No.44465131[source]▶
“As pain becomes chronic, it is increasingly associated with activity in the affective and motivational systems tied to avoidance and less closely tied to systems encoding nociceptive input” [1]

I’ve been on the slippery slope of chronic pain. Minor post surgery issues caused me to change my routine and avoid certain activities which only exacerbated the issues, which led to more avoidance. Eventually I couldn’t walk.

The American medical system is very focused on avoiding health issues that show up on mri, rather than quality of life health. But quality of life issues quickly become serious.

I think the middle ground of activity: not all out intense as if you are healthy, but also not avoiding movement is so challenging to find for many people but also so crucial. A lot of chronic pain for myself and I suspect for many others could be avoided with short and quick combination of therapy and daily movement. So simple but so challenging to effectively identify and allocate resources.

Not suggesting this is the total solution but it’s the pathway that I took to return to activity and I’ve seen it help a number of my friends as well.

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8482298/

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1. anticensor ◴[04 Jul 25 15:03 UTC] No.44465178[source]▶
Pain is a legitimate diagnosis, though.
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2. zdragnar ◴[04 Jul 25 15:32 UTC] No.44465396[source]▶
Pain is a symptom. There's a strong psychological component to pain avoidance which can lead to behaviors that make it worse. Physical therapy isn't going to feel good, but it plays an important role in lots of recovery scenarios, and I think should be more often prescribed after surgeries.

I deal with fibromyalgia pain. When I first developed it, I pretty much avoided doing anything, and really that was the opposite of what I should have done. There's no "recovery" and really no avoiding it; all I ended up doing was letting my physical condition weaken to the point that even normal activities were painful, so I was hurting for two reasons.

Treating the underlying cause of the symptom, and training to avoid behaviors that exacerbate the symptom is the real key.

3. nradov ◴[04 Jul 25 19:39 UTC] No.44467275[source]▶
Make friends with pain.