Far too often, I and many other people with chronic pain have heard that we just need to “push through” the pain and keep going. This is especially prevalent among teenage girls. Our current society holds an image of teenage girls in its mind; lazy, dramatic, and emotional, which makes it harder for us to get taken seriously or to get any advice other than to “just ignore it.” However, on March 9, NPR published an article titled “Invisibilia: For Some Teens With Debilitating Pain, The Treatment Is More Pain”, which suggested that pushing through the pain can not only be beneficial but that it can be considered a treatment for some teenagers with chronic pain.
The article was a summary of an episode of a podcast run by NPR called Invisibilia, which they describe as being about “unseeable forces that control human behavior and shape our ideas, beliefs, and assumptions.” The article starts by telling the story of a teenage girl, Devyn, and her mom, Shiela. Devyn is a dancer who one day, randomly starts feeling excruciating pain. She eventually gets diagnosed with amplified pain. The article defines amplified pain as when the nerves send out pain signals when nothing is really wrong. Basically, the pain is all in their heads. It’s almost exclusively diagnosed in teenage girls, which is interestingly coincidental, seeing as teenage girls are the least likely to be believed about their pain by doctors. The article describes how Devyn makes friends with others with amplified pain and how her mother fears that her identity is being “built around being sick,” which is an incredibly harmful idea. For those of us with chronic pain, our communities are our only support. Nevertheless, Shiela wants to get rid of Devyn’s pain and finds Dr. David Sherry.
Dr. Sherry is a pediatric rheumatologist at the Children’s Hospital of Philidelphia. He is confident that putting teens with amplified pain in immense amounts of pain for long periods of time will “cure” them of their pain. The big issue is that he believes that the reason there has been an influx of chronic pain patients recently is that society has focused too much attention on fixing the pain and that “pain used to be more accepted as a normal and predictable part of life,” which is completely untrue. The reason there used to be so many fewer people talking about chronic pain is because we couldn’t talk about our pain. We would just suffer in silence because, especially if we were a woman, no one would believe us. But now, chronic pain is more widely believed, so those of us who live with it feel safer and more comfortable talking about it and seeking treatment. That’s why there are seemingly more chronic pain patients in the past, not because society is coddling us, but because it has started to accept us.
Devyn is then enrolled in a program based on Dr. Sherry’s philosophy, which has many rigorous rules. Participants would be forced to go through workouts that would last five to six hours, five days a week. The entire objective, as described by Dr. Emily Fox – one of the doctors at the program – was to put participants in “as much pain as they possibly could,” which makes me wonder how exactly this program was greenlit. Did no one even bring up the idea that this could be considered torture or consider that it could cause lasting physical and mental damage? Participants are also not allowed to mention pain, and neither are their parents. What would happen if the teenagers actually hurt themselves? It would be so easy to dismiss it as “just pain” due to the idea of pain given off by the rules of the program. Even more questionable is the rule that no medication could be taken, even if it was for an unrelated issue, which comes into play when Devyn starts having an asthma attack but the physical therapists don’t let her use her inhaler and instead, have her walk a lap. How is this considered safe? The scarier question: if her asthma attack had progressed, would they then let her receive medical attention or would they force her to “push through it” as to “not dwell on the pain”?
As a teenage girl with chronic pain myself, I just can’t help but see all the ways this could go horrifically wrong. Doctors who run a similar program even admit that “they measure success not in terms of lessened pain, but in terms of kids getting back to activities they want to do,” or in other words, they don’t really care how much pain kids are in. They just want the kids to “push through” the pain and go back to being “normal.” This is such an insensitive view of kids with chronic pain, yet one that is all too familiar. In elementary school, instead of teaching me easier and less painful ways to do things, the physical and occupational therapists I had tried to make me “normal.” Physical therapy was the worst; I once had an awful physical therapist who, even if I told her my pain was a “bad hurt,” would force me to keep going and would sometimes make me do more if I complained about being in pain. This program perpetuates the idea that teens’ pain isn’t the problem, it’s the teens’ complaints of their pain. At the end of the program, many of the participants rank their pain levels lower, but I can’t help but wonder if their pain was actually lower or if they were just saying their pain was lower to stop the treatment.
An anonymous Reddit user, after the NPR article was published, wrote about their experience with this same program and how “[they] ended up leaving the program, like many of the others in [their] cohort, by lying about being in less pain.” They explained how whenever the therapists weren’t in the room, they and the other participants would discuss and agree that they weren’t feeling better. The Reddit user also said that as a result of the program, they developed a fear of physical activity which required them to go to therapy and that from all the participants they know, “only one person was a true success.”
This is not the first instance of ableism and sexism in the medical community. Many conditions are underdiagnosed because when a woman is in pain, especially if it’s a teenage girl, the doctor will assume it has something to do with their period or that they’re being “hysterical.” Doctors tend to believe numbers and test results over their patients, but when it comes to pain, there is no way to judge how much pain a patient is in other than to listen to them and believe them, even if they’re “only” a teenager.
The bottom line is it’s completely irresponsible to push putting teenagers in a lot of pain as a “treatment” for chronic pain when in reality, it can actually cause people’s nerves to become more hypersensitive (for example, after 16.5 years of being in pain, I can no longer stand to wear jeans or sweatpants). Putting teenage girls who are in already in pain all the time in as much pain as possible isn’t treatment, it’s torture. Just recently, I had to stand for two and a half hours straight for a chorus rehearsal and forgot to take my pain medications beforehand and… oh my goodness, I’m cured! Oh, wait… nope, that’s not how it works, and I’m still in pain.
