Name: What's the point of pain? | BBC Ideas
Uploaded: 2025-07-20T19:01:47.000Z
Duration: 5 min 36 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Adverbs of degree

There are times when it's so intense, when the volume is so high, that I just wish somebody would come along and unzip my body and just take it away.

Adverbs of manner

Humankind has constantly tried to define pain.

Most of the pains that we feel are day-to-day and they do resolve.

It's making us rest and protect the area and make sure it doesn't get infected if it's a wound.

And so day-to-day pain may be kind of annoying, but it is really important.

A life without pain would be very dangerous and life-threatening.

So if I were to tell you how my pain is at the moment, it actually feels today as if someone's trying to put a wetsuit on me, but this wetsuit is just covered in tiny tacks that are really, really sharp and they're pulling on this wetsuit all the time.

It also feels as if there are people with drills on the soles of my feet and there are lots and lots of people and they're just drilling into my feet and my legs feel really tight as if someone's got giant hands that are just really, really squeezing.

It's experienced as almost real events, like being pinched and squeezed very severe, what feel like electrical pulses and clinical exercises.  No experts in pain are able to right away identify neuropathic pain because of these awful descriptors.

The last kind of pain, the third kind of pain, is really the mystery and that is the existence of pain for which there is no obvious origin.

So that does not in any way mean that it isn't real.

It's 100% real, it's just that our understanding of our bodies is limited at the moment and you can't find an injury.

So we're left with a population of people who are really suffering from pain and it interferes with their life but we don't understand where it comes from.

Pain itself is a hidden disability and I think it's really difficult to get that across because you can't see somebody else's pain.

I suppose in every walk of life, if you feel understood, that's half the battle and I think that journey of trying to explain yourself is a really hard one.

It's absolutely exhausting when you don't feel believed.

It has such a massive effect on your mental well-being that living with that pressure is almost just as hard as the pain and why should people understand if they haven't experienced it but also there is the word compassion and you're hoping that there might be more compassion around.

I think the outstanding mystery is why is it that a substantial number of our population are suffering from pain without any obvious biological purpose.

I'm not sure that in my lifetime there's going to be a magic potion that suddenly will take all the pain away but I think the more that we all talk about it, that's where I feel hopeful, that's where I can do my little bit, that's the optimistic bit.

As for where all the nails and the screwdrivers and the drills in my feet will go, I don't know but I have to believe that I will find my way forward.

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