Contextualizing and Individualizing Truth-Telling About Pain in a Tough and Unjust World

摘要

With pleasure and delight, we read the target article by Dr. Nada Gligorov (2018), joining basic neuroscience, clinical pain medicine, and bioethics. We want to elaborate on this laudable and remarkable integration with more details on recent pain research concepts on how the measurable patient’s individual pain phenotype should inform pain treatment and truth-telling about pain, some of which Dr. Gligarov mentioned in passing. Furthermore, we thought it would be interesting to contextualize Dr. Gligarov’s discourse with clinical examples from obstetric anesthesia. Conceptionally, we propose to considerer the time domain, namely, recurring encounters and prior experiences, which will resonate with the patient previous truthtelling and pain experiences. Last but not least, we feel truth-telling about pain must consider the persistent and pervasive health care disparities in pain medicine. This leads us to inquire about the perspectives at the receiving end of truth-telling about pain, the patients concerned.