Economic Value of Pain

 

With the down turning economy, the question of value becomes more of a priority.  When money gets scarce, people start to look at their situations and put a value on it.  With a limited amount of money to spend in people’s day-to-day lives, they have to spend it only on things they value highly.  The less money they have, the more restricted the spending becomes and the higher value things in their life, is where their money needs to go.

 

When it comes to pain, especially facial pain, this becomes a highly relevant subject.  People with annoying pain will often try and set aside their pain to put their money into things that they value more.  However, as pain increases it works its way up in the value system of a patient to the point where they will spend the money treating their pain.

 

The catch-22 of this is that the financial hard times that people are currently experiencing increases the sympathetic nervous system activity (anxiety), which is very commonly connected to the person’s pain system; therefore as stress increases so does pain.  For this reason, it is necessary for people, that when they have any sort of facial pain, that they should get it taken care of sooner rather than later.

 

If this pain can be taken care of sooner, then the chances of it becoming connected to a sympathetic nervous system is vastly decreased.  However, as pain becomes more chronic and long term, the sympathetic nervous system takes over to the point where it is more difficult to treat and it takes much longer to reduce the pain.  It is much more expensive to reduce chronic pain than it is acute pain.

 

Therefore, I encourage my patients to increase the value of their pain, even though it seems “annoying” at the time. There is a likely hidden potential of it becoming very expensive at a later date.

 

God Bless,

Ron Prehn