Pain – A phenomenon of the mind🔗

There is an interesting incident from my wandering days that I want to share with you. During the days of my spiritual journey, I was once with some tribal people in Madhya Pradesh in India. I was living in a small temple in the center of the village. One day I noticed a pregnant lady entering a small hut. After about half an hour, she came out with a small baby in her hands! No pain, no doctor, no nurse, no medicine, no cries. In half an hour she came out walking with a baby in her arms.

I was shocked! I could not ask anything because I did not know their language. After one month, I saw another pregnant lady do the same thing. In half an hour she came out with a baby. I asked the local priest who came to the temple, ‘How does this happen? Don’t they have any pain?’ He asked, ‘Pain? Why pain?’

I was amazed. The very idea that women should have pain at the time of delivery did not exist in their society! Not only that, nobody suffered from gynecological issues like menopause problems either.

I started enquiring about their lifestyle. I understood that in their tradition, they respect women a lot. The moment a girl becomes physically mature, she is acknowledged with respect that she is now qualified to become a mother. People fall at her feet and she touches and heals them! Just because of this different conditioning, the women don’t suffer the usual pains that women in other cultures do.

There have been recorded instances of 'phantom pain' which is pain in a part of the body that does not exist. Once in the Second World War, a soldier's leg had to be amputated because it was badly damaged. The strange thing was that when he became conscious again he was still complaining about the pain in the leg. He was covered with a blanket so he had no idea that the leg had been removed. The blanket was removed and he was shown that his leg was not there anymore. He was shocked!

Further research then showed that each part of the body is related to a certain part of the brain. When a certain part of the body feels pain, the corresponding brain center shows activity. In this case, the related brain center was still vibrating in the same way it was vibrating when the leg was a part of the body. There are many such instances of people who feel pain in the empty space where their limbs were amputated. This is called 'phantom pain'.

The mind has tremendous influence over the body. Even the perception of physical pain can be changed by the mind. In science they call it the 'placebo effect' when a simple sugar pill gives the same effect as a painkiller, just because the person is made to believe that the sugar pill is a painkiller!

The other day, I was reading about research done at the University of Michigan in the USA that appeared in the Journal of Neuroscience. The research was done on a group of young men who agreed to let researchers inject their jaw muscles with a concentrated saline solution, causing pain. The brain's response to the pain was studied using PET (Positron Emission Tomography) scans that showed the activity of the body's natural painkillers, called endorphins.

In one scan, the men were told they were being given a painkiller but actually what was given was just a placebo – a substance that had no painkilling properties. Then they were asked to rate the intensity of the pain they felt on a scale of 0 to 100. Also, the PET scan would indicate the brain activity related to pain. The researchers were able to study both the response of the brain and what the men actually felt.

The amazing observation was that when the men were given a placebo, meaning not a painkiller but just a neutral substance, the pain they felt was actually less. It was as if they had been given the painkiller itself! The PET scans indicated that the endorphin (natural painkiller) system in the brain was activated.

'Placebo Effects Mediated by Endogenous Opioid Activity on μ-Opioid Receptors', Journal of Neuroscience, August 24, 2005, 25(34):7754-7762

'Neurobiological Mechanisms of the Placebo Effect', Journal of Neuroscience, November 9, 2005, 25(45):10390-10402 It showed increased activity with the placebo, just because the person believed that it was a painkiller! Further studies have shown that the placebo effect was observed in more than 70% of the people, where the pain decreased by up to 22%. Science is still studying this amazing phenomenon, which so clearly shows the mind-body connection.