Chapter 23: The Pain You Were Not Supposed to Keep
Ancestral pain was a signal: injury, response, healing, resolution. Chronic pain -- affecting 619 million people with back pain alone -- is a modern condition where the signal became the disease.
◆ Key Insights
Lower back pain is the leading cause of disability on Earth, affecting 619 million people globally
Central sensitization means the nervous system can learn to produce pain without any ongoing tissue damage
The opioid crisis is a pharmaceutical mismatch: treating evolved acute-pain signals with drugs that hijack the reward system
Chronic pain correlates strongly with sedentary behavior, social isolation, and poor sleep -- all mismatch conditions
Pain was designed to resolve in days to weeks; chronic pain persists because the environmental conditions that cause it never change
Read the full chapter to learn why pain that never ends isn't a signal of damage -- and what's really driving it.
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