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Dr. Case, investigating indicators of poor health, discovered that middle-aged people, unlike the young and unlike the elderly, were reporting more pain in recent years than in the past. A third in this group reported they had chronic joint pain over the years 2011 to 2013, and one in seven said they had sciatica. Those with the least education reported the most pain and the worst general health.
Low education levels would be consistent with higher-than-usual development of pain-related conditions. If you're not educated, you're probably working manual or unskilled jobs for much of your life. As you hit your forties, the body (if it hasn't already) starts to break down, either from overuse or a combination of manual work with shitty diet choices. This can also be true of women if they're working sedentary or long hours in data entry roles. Your body starts to pay you back with pain, so you go to a GP who prescribes painkillers. And the addiction starts. GPs are not the same as pain management specialists -- there are any number of tricks the latter have outside pharmaceuticals for blocking pain or reducing it, and it's not new-agey acupuncture type stuff, either.
Having said that, and it's a big post I plan to put up later on following a seminar I went to recently about brain chemistry and stress -- depression can actually cause physical pain, and is chronically maltreated across all medical areas. The surgeon I saw lecturing was quite frank that depression is dealt with unlike virtually every other form of physical ailment in that it's the one condition where we don't intervene or try to remedy it before it gets critically bad. This is resting on the idea that depression is essentially caused by a screamingly low level of neurotransmitters in the brain. Low neurotransmitter levels are also found where chronic pain is firing throughout the nervous system. That is, your pain can be exacerbated by, if not caused by, your depression.
Antidepressants are generally prescribed to try and address that low level of chemical in the brain. But as with cholesterol-lowering drugs, they typically don't work as a curative on their own. You have to engage in a number of lifestyle changes to get your neurotransmitter levels back up to normal.
And as I said, antidepressants are invariably prescribed at the last possible moment when it comes to treating depression clinically. Continuing with our cholesterol example, if you go to a doctor and your blood test reveals a raised cholesterol level, the doctor typically (if he has any brain) tell you to do something about your diet, lifestyle, and exercise right away and then come back in a couple of months to see if there's been a change. If you do those things and then come back and your cholesterol level is still elevated, then and only then does the doctor start prescribing medication.
Concordantly, no doctor in the world would says "Oh, your cholesterol's elevated? Tell you what, go away, continue doing what you were doing. We'll wait until it's completely clogging your veins and then we'll intervene." But this is exactly how depression in society is treated medically. Medicine generally does not intervene on depression until you have reached a critical, life-endangering point. And when it does, it usually just treats it pharmaceutically -- it doesn't tend to look at lifestyle or other factors.
Some of these figures, then, could well be untreated or undiagnosed depression at work. It's certainly consistent with the socioeconomic group, pain that cripples you making you unable to work and therefore lack purpose, the age group (serotonin and dopamine production start tapering off with age), self-medication via alcohol or drug abuse, and suicide.
As said, I want to do a big post on neurotransmitters and brain chemistry because this lecture blew my head off, but it's still an important point to note.
Remissas, discite, vivet.
God save us from people who mean well. -storm