Article May 4, 1981 Issue

The healing of pain

CARL J. WELZ

An article in Quest magazine quotes psychiatrist Gerald Aronoff, director of the pain unit of Massachusetts Rehabilitation Hospital in Boston, as saying that he believes "half the people who go to outpatient clinics with physical complaints are really saying, 'My life hurts.' Pain is really an existential expression." Quest, June 1979, p. 38 .

Dr. John Bonica, founder of University of Washington's Pain Clinic, says, "All pain is in the mind," The Middlesex News (Mass.), March 16, 1979. and the Associated Press article from which this is quoted paraphrases Dr. Bonica: "When you burn your hand, for instance, you just think your hand hurts. It's your brain that registers the pain and flashes to the hand to move it off the stove."

Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, deals with pain as entirely mental. In the chapter "Science, Theology, Medicine" in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures we find this: "You say, I have burned my finger.' This is an exact statement, more exact than you suppose; for mortal mind, and not matter, burns it." She continues, "Holy inspiration has created states of mind which have been able to nullify the action of the flames, as in the Bible case of the three young Hebrew captives, cast into the Babylonian furnace; while an opposite mental state might produce spontaneous combustion." Science and Health, p. 161.

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