On Pain and Suffering
Reminiscences, Musings and Reflections
by
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p. (9) If I cut my finger and feel pain, that is not a problem because I understand what happened to me and accept pain as a normal byproduct of laceration. However, when I say that I should have been more careful, and that this should not have happened to me, and why am I so careless, and what is wrong with me that I cut myself so often, or why does it always happen to me, then I have created for myself a problem . . . p. (9) One could say that the world is full of obstacles, which are not created by us, but which are in our way, making us stumble and fall, and making our attainment of goals painful or impossible. In reality, however, there are never obstacles without us having created them. If we are going nowhere then nothing can be in our way. By creating for ourselves unattainable goals, the obstacles in our way become painful and insurmountable . . . p. 25/26 We know that Jesus did not suffer, because he did not complain. He did not procrastinate trying to answer such questions as: "Where did I come from? Why am I here? Is there any justice? Where am I going? What kind of father is he that having me as his only son he was willing to sacrifice me? Did he love me so much that he could have sacrificed the world for me? How would he feel if I said to him that I loved the world so much that I was ready to sacrifice him? Being omnipotent, could he not just say ‘Let the world be saved!’ as he did so well when he said ‘Let there be light!’ on the first day of creation?" Jesus had the ready-made answers to these questions, and he was ready to tell them to those who were anxious to listen, but he was not the one who asked them . . . p. (156) "I got it now!" replied Dr. Abelard, snapping his fingers. "It all makes a perfect sense to me. Your womb just could not stand the constant exposure to the assault and battery by your husband, and it simply had run away, settling down in your left shoulder. In women who do not have enough sex, their wombs get starved and break out of their natural moorings, looking for greener pastures. In their cases we advise more sex. But your case is different; you have too much of it. This is the reason for your shoulder pain . . . p. (198) As we are witnessing the exponential growth of information on Internet, the availability of hundreds of search engines, the ease of retrieving information from CD-ROM, the ability to digitally store volumes of information on a single CD, the interactive mode of CD-ROM, educational TV programs, and medical consultations by e-mail, the once coveted, lucrative, respected and honored title of the Doctor of Medicine is gradually loosing its glitter and heading into obscurity. The eight expected functions discussed above was once the exclusive domain of the medical profession. It is no longer tenable. By and by the medical practitioner is beginning to look like the 5th wheel in a wagon, or a firemen on Diesel locomotives. Let us enumerate those functions, which are becoming rapidly obsolete . . . p. (201) All these skills are by now either outdated, redundant, or performed perfunctorily. The significance of their results is overridden by other more objective measurements. Putting the stethoscope to the patient’s chest is nowadays as significant as the gesture of crossing oneself during the church services, which is indistinguishable from shooing away the flies from one’s face. An X-ray showing clear lungs and no fluid overrides the presence of fluid in the chest cavity as diagnosed by a physician eliciting the dull sound on percussion. Whatever the presumptive diagnosis a physician makes, based on his training and previous clinical experience, it is superseded by the laboratory findings thus making his diagnosis redundant.
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About the Book
Pain is a disagreeable physical sensation pointing to a disease of the body. Suffering is psychological pain arising from the turmoil in the mind. Specifically, suffering comes about as the result of questioning one’s worth, meaning and purpose in life. A purposeful action is free of suffering irrespective of the accompanying pain. Jesus is an epitome of a non-sufferer; Job is the sufferer par excellence. In the wake of waning faith in the divine creator, the suffering has been on the increase. The number of sufferers, unsuccessfully seeking help from science-based medical practitioners, put the National Health Service under severe financial strain. Science-based chemical placeboes are inadequate for treatment of suffering, which requires faith-based approaches. There has been an exodus of disenchanted physicians from general practice into specialties and non-medical occupations. The explosion of information on the Internet and technical advances in diagnostic testing appear to make the services of a general practitioner redundant. The future belongs to the Cyber Medicine, with each person becoming his/her own personal physician in consultation with the Cyber MD, online. The book is replete with tales of faith-based approaches to reducing the mental pain of the sufferers.
About the Author
Walter Prytulak describes himself as an iconoclast. His criticism of presently published works on social, political, and economic issues is, that they are replete with what is wrong, but fail to grapple with what can be done about it. In his first work Paradise Regained: Prospects for a New Social Order in the Third Millennium, Walter Prytulak traces the evils in a society to the power inherent in money, which starves people into employment. His answer to the problem is disempowerment of money by the introduction of the free food staples plan. In his second work Neither Created nor Evolved he traces the roots of hatred, retribution, and wars to the concept of God-the Creator, and argues for the world free of creator. In his present work On Pain and Suffering he deals with precarious state of the National Health, and traces the root of the problem to increased stress-related suffering and predicts the obsolescence of the medical practitioners and the takeover of the public health by the Cyber MD. Walter Prytulak has a medical degree from the University of Innsbruck, Austria, and a diploma degree in psychiatry from the Toronto University in Canada. His reminiscences, musings, and reflections on the subject of pain and suffering are derived from his 40 years clinical experience as a psychiatrist.