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As a practicing pain specialist, I often get questions from my patients on the topic of pain. People often have basic questions like "Why does pain have to hurt so much?" or "Why does it have to hurt for so long after my injury?" When you hear the same questions from different patients over time, you start to realize that there are many people who have questions about pain, and the book was a response to that. I wanted to share some of my knowledge on WHY pain hurts. Chapter 1 of the book really introduces pain to the reader as a sophisticated alarm system in our bodies to help us adapt to danger in our surroundings.

Absolutely. In Chapter 2, I talk about children that are born without the ability to feel pain. There are other conditions, like diabetes, which also result in our inability to sense pain. Along with this lack of pain, comes injuries to our bodies, which we can’t always prevent because we can’t sense the pain when we sustain the injury. If you think of pain like I do as a sophisticated smoke alarm consider that if your home smoke alarm was broken, you might not know there was a fire in your house.

Sometimes people dismiss psychological pain, and consider physical pain to be more of a "real" pain. But there is evidence that psychological pain is "felt" in some of the same areas of our brain as physical pain is. People who have lived through intense physical pain and psychological pain in many cases will report that the psychological pain was far worse than the physical pain. Psychological pain is often described as that "gut-wrenching" sensation we get when we have psychological distress.

In Why It Hurts, I share some real stories of my patients that experienced positive transformation as a result of their pain. I think we can all learn from painful events in our lives. There is a message in these events, and once we learn to use these as a tool for growth, we get better at living life. Pain becomes an opportunity, and not just an inconvenience.

According to psychologist Carl Jung, myth is a manifestation of our collective unconscious. We create myths to work through our struggles in life, which may serve as a sophisticated coping mechanism. If you look at heroes in myth, their journey is often a road paved with painful events that are transformative. For example, I really love Game of Thrones, and in my book I talk about painful transformations of two of the characters, Jon Snow and Daenerys Targaryen. I also compare them to two real-life heroes, Nelson Mandela and Oprah Winfrey. I try to point out some similarities with regards to painful transformations between the fictional and real-life heroes.

I believe resilience is how we meet with adversity or pain in our lives. If we believe that pain helps us and a life without pain would be a disadvantage, then we have to try and meet pain with an attitude of resilience. The Navy SEALs are a great example of this, through their motto, "The Only Easy Day Was Yesterday".