Even the most casual glance at research into the amount of pain we suffer confirms the truth. We struggle as much now with pain in our backs, joints, spines, and feet as we did with dental decay in the 1600s. But why on earth, in an age of electric vehicles and space travel, do we struggle with old-fashioned pain. The answer to that is a long story, but here we will look at three of the key reasons we struggle so much to manage pain in our modern world.

Number One: Pain is Invisible 

It is pretty obvious and easy to diagnose a black eye, even without a medical degree. The same is true if you have eczema, a common cold, a bloody nose, and many other outwardly visible health issues. Pain, on the other hand, is entirely invisible. Not only is pain invisible to the person who is suffering from the pain, but the pain is also invisible to other people and is even often invisible to the eyes and ears of modern medicine. There is no scan or blood test to diagnose you with a migraine. An x-ray or an MRI scan will rarely show you the cause of back pain. If you have heel pain, there is no modern scan that is sensitive enough to show the subtle buildup of scar tissue in your foot, and there was undoubtedly no blood test to confirm the diagnosis. We have a long history of struggling with invisible causes of disease and unwellness.

Up until the last 200 years, millions upon millions of deaths each year at the hands of bacteria and viruses that we didn’t even know existed. Long after figuring out how to defend ourselves from wild animals, we struggled with microbes primarily because we couldn’t see them and didn’t know they existed. This situation is not too dissimilar from where we find ourselves with pain in the 21st century; we cannot see it; therefore, we struggle to manage it. Even the experts struggle to find much agreement over its true causes.