Can such a place exist? It not only can鈥攊t does. But it鈥檚 no utopia. It鈥檚 a colony for leprosy patients: a world where people literally feel no pain, and reap horrifying consequences.
His work with leprosy patients in India and the United States convinced Dr. Paul Brand that pain truly is one of God鈥檚 great gifts to us. In this inspiring story of his fifty-year career as a healer, Dr. Brand probes the mystery of pain and reveals its importance. As an indicator that lets us know something is wrong, pain has a value that becomes clearest in its absence.
The Gift of Pain looks at what pain is and why we need it. Together, the renowned surgeon and award-winning writer Philip Yancey shed fresh light on a gift that none of us want and none of us can do without.
Dr. Paul Wilson Brand, CBE (17 July 1914 鈥� 8 July 2003) grew up in India, studied medicine in London, and practiced orthopedic surgery in India and the United States. He achieved world renown for his innovative techniques in the treatment of leprosy.
He was a pioneer in developing tendon transfer techniques for use in the hands of those with leprosy. He was the first physician to appreciate that leprosy did not cause the rotting away of tissues, but that it was the loss of the sensation of pain which made sufferers susceptible to injury. Brand contributed extensively to the fields of hand surgery and hand therapy through his publications and lectures, He wrote Clinical Mechanics of the Hand, still considered a classic in the field of hand surgery
He also wrote popular autobiographical books about his childhood, his parents' missionary work, and his philosophy about the valuable properties of pain. One of his best known books, co-written with Philip Yancey, is Pain: The Gift Nobody Wants (1993), republished in 1997 as The Gift of Pain.
Before his death in 2003, he received many honors, including the prestigious Albert Lasker Award and appointment as Commander of the Order of the British Empire.
subtitle: WARNING: Life Without Pain Could Really Hurt You
Dr. Brand grew up as an MK in India and he ended up returning to India as an adult to work with leprosy patients. The science of this book absolutely fascinated me. And yet, as a lay person, it was written in a way that I could understand it.
Especially as Westerners, we run and hide from pain, but Dr. Brand shows how a pain free life can lead to disaster. Very intersting concept.
For years after I read this book, I would bring it up in conversation. I know people thought I was weird.
I should put it back onto my "to read again" list.
Here are some quotes from the book:
Pain is not the enemy, but the loyal scout announcing the enemy...Pain truly is the gift nobody wants....On my travels I have observed an ironic law of reversal at work: as a society gains the ability to limit suffering, it loses the ability to cope with what suffering remains.....The average Indian villager knows suffereing well, expects it, and accepts it as an unavoidable challenge of life. In a remarkable way the people of India have learned to control pain at the level of the mind and spirit, and have developed endurance that we in the West find hard to understand. Westerners, in contrast, tend to view suffering as an injustice or failure, an infringement on their guaranteed right to happiness. pages 187-188
I can count on pain to represent my best interests in the most urgent way available. It is then up to me to act on those recommendations. page 228
Previously I had thought of pain as a blemish in creation, God's one great mistake. Tommy Lewis taught me otherwise. Seen from his point of view, pain stands out as an extraordinary feat of engineering valuable beyond measure. page 62
The body has millions of nerve sensors, distributed not randomly, but in exact accordance with each part's need. A light tap on the foot goes unnoticed, on the groin is felt as painful, and on the eye causes anguish...The eye is a thousand times more sensitive to pain than the sole of the foot because it faces peculiar hazards...On the other hand, the foot is designed to bear the body's weight: it has tougher supporting structures, a plentiful blood supply, and a thousand times less sensitivity to pain.... The reflex response provides a good illustration of the pain network's sophisticated design. When a danger - touching a hot stove, stepping on a thorn, blinking in a dust storm - requires a quick response, the body delegates it to a reflex loop that functions below the level of consciousness. Tehre's no advantage to thinking about the stove, so why bother the higher brain with an action that can be handled at the reflex level? Yet - and I marvel at the in-built wisdom of the body - the higher brain reserves the right to overrule this reflex loop under unusual circumstances. An expert rock climber clinging to a precipice will not straighten his leg when a falling stone hits the patellar tendon; a society matron will not drop a too-hot cup of tea served in Wedgwood china; the survivor of a plane crash will repress reflexes and walk shoeless across shards of glass and hot metal. - pages 64-65
Simple premise, lots of story-telling (which I love). Completely transformed how I see pain.
As a periphery, I found his wonder of the world and the human body to be contagious; I couldn鈥檛 help but want to learn more about God鈥檚 creation as I read.
"I am not a 鈥減ain expert鈥� in the traditional sense. I have never worked in a pain clinic and have had limited experience in pain management. Instead, I came to appreciate the subtleties of pain by treating those who do not feel it."
Dr. Brand was a general surgeon who went to India and learnt hand surgery skills on Tendon transfer techniques on cadavers in order to treat paralysed thumb and claw-hand syndrome in leprosy patients who do not feel pain. A former casualty surgeon in the London Blitz, he was the first physician to suggest that leprosy is a disease of the nerves, not of the tissue: it is the loss of the sensation of pain which makes patients susceptible to injury and leads to rotting tissue, especially in the extremities.
"A missionary called Ruth Thomas set up a physiotherapy area in our clinic, equipping it with facilities for hot paraffin treatment and electrical stimulation of muscles. She was a pioneer, one of the first Physiotherapists in the world to work with leprosy patients. [...]But our leprosy patients, without a pain reflex, had no built-in safeguards for repair and healing. We had to impose them from outside. Most physiotherapists in hand surgery have to coax their recuperating patients to move their fingers a little more each day. We fought the opposite problem of preventing them from moving their fingers too much too soon. All day long I heard the words 鈥淕ently now鈥� and 鈥淛ust a little鈥� from Ruth Thomas."
Brand takes us through quite a bit of his life and his medical experience with (a tad outdated) Hand Surgery/Therapy and leprosy - constantly advocating for the Mind - he details on many of his cases and surgeries and all the madness that comes with educating the patient, it's not a difficult read -but specific - and one of the places to read the story of tendons (and other body parts) injured by leprosy. With a pinch of symbolic tilting at windmills. But the doctor does write from some position of empathy towards his patients, so there's that.
"The mind, not the cells of the injured hand, will determine the final extent of rehabilitation, because without strong motivation the patient simply will not endure the disciplines of recovery. After surgery, a hand patient has the overpowering sensation 鈥淢y hand hurts.鈥� But as we have seen, that sensation is a clever invention of the mind: what really hurts is the felt image of the hand stored away in the spinal cord and brain. "
"No matter how strongly I warned them in advance, they seemed disappointed to find that our surgeries did not restore sensation. Yes, they could now curl their fingers around a gummy ball of rice, but the rice felt neutral, the same as wood or grass or velvet. They gained the ability to shake hands, but could not feel the warmth and texture and firmness of the hand they were shaking. I had to teach them not to grasp someone else鈥檚 hand too tightly; they could not tell when they were hurting the other person. For them, touch had lost all meaning. And so had pain."
It is pertinent of Brand to use that Paul Valery quote: "at the end of the mind, the body -but at the end of the body, the mind.鈥�