If you have chronic pain you know that doctors, your family, even your friends will often gaslight you and try to minimize the amount of pain you are experiencing. You will likely find yourself, as I have, in the ER or at a visit with your primary care doctor begging for them to take your pain seriously as you suffer infront of them, but more often than not they don’t take you as seriously as they should. They just don’t get it unless they have lived it and many simply assume that those of us with chronic pain must be “drug seeking”. We are often told to tough it out, given inadequate doses of opioids or other pain killers in the hospital but left with no help once we leave and now Dr. Sanjay Gupta is also gaslighting us telling us “its all in your head”.
Rewiring the brain: A July 2025 podcast episode of Chasing Life with Dr. Sanjay Gupta featured a discussion with clinical therapist Dr. Eric Garland on how mindfulness meditation can be as effective as opioids for treating chronic pain. They explained the science behind how “leaning into” pain rather than avoiding it can help rewire the brain and provide lasting relief.
This sounds a lot like the advice our Nazi administration is giving pregnant women. “Just tough it out if you can”. “Don’t take Tylenol while pregnant. It can cause autism.” We know that is both unscientific and laughable. Pregnant women experience very real and sometimes severe pain. Telling them to “tough it out” is insensitive and cruel. Not to mention there is no scientifically proven link between taking Tylenol and children born with autism. It simply doesn’t exist.
While it is true that meditation, distractions, focusing on things other thanyour pain can help relieve pain temporarily, it is not a cure and for those of us with severe chronic pain, its offensive. If you have servere chronic pain or pain that resurfaces and can be intense like chronic spinal pain, nerve pain, intense tooth pain etc., you know that often its simply impossible to focus on anything but the pain sometimes. So telling people to mind-fuck themselves out of pain is both insensitive and idiotic.
What drives me crazy about this is for decades now many of us have been telling the US government to reschedule marijuana. Why? Because once rescheduled it can be studied federally and we can use the research to develope better non opioid related medicines to treat pain. One that are derived from the plant itself. If the government hadn’t made weed illegal in the first place we might never have even had an opioid epidemic. We might already have better pain meds that aren’t highly destructive and addictive. We could have saved tens of thousands maybe even millions of lives! But no no no the Christian fascists who control the DEA can’t let that happen!
So lets just implant a device in your brain that can be hacked or controlled by someone else and that can cure your pain! Why not right? Does anyone else see how this is dangerous?! Doing experimental barin surgery and giving someone else the ability to control your pain levels and alter your brain chemistry through experimental electronics instead of using a plant that grows in the ground that has been proven to help?
Not only is telling people that its “all in your head” and “pain lives in the brain” dangerous, its medical gaslighting to assume we can just do yoga or meditate it away or that these new devices and implants are any less dangerous than opioids. They present many new risks that Gupta seems to ignore.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-04-29/calls-for-action-on-spinal-cord-stimulators/103776134
How about instead of telling us with pain its “all in our head” and to simply distract ourselves or implant dangerous things into our bodies we hold the US government and the Christian fascists running it and who have controled the DEA and law enforcement in this country for decades accountable for allowing opioids while criminalizing marijuana and other safer options to treat pain? How about holding them responsible for not demanding alternative treatments like accupuncture and massage be included and covered by all insurances? You do realize the reason they made marijuana illegal and argued against Eastern and Oriental treatments like accupunture is all rooted in racism right? Why not ask for and demand more from our government and medical staff? Why not demand they change their racist, ignorant ways instead trying to mind-fuck and gaslight us and get us to implant dangerous things into our brains and bodies?! Is that too much to ask?! I guess so.
I’m not saying meditation, distracting yourself, and non medication related treatments don’t work. They do help. However if you have severe pain they often aren’t enough and its not ok to pretend they are! Stop leaving people in pain and start finding solutions that actually work instead of trying to mind-fuck us or gaslight us. Its offensive, its wrong, and it leaves people in pain to suffer and feel like nobody really understands them or cares.
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