[pain] today's articulation

[kaberett]

A significant part of the problem is that we only start saying "all pain is in the brain" (or "the tissue isn't the issue" or whatever) to people with complex or chronic pain.

And there's a good reason for that! It's the same reason that I need to have a much more detailed idea of the fine detail of what an atom is and how it behaves than the vast majority of the population, for whom the Bohr model is perfectly adequate!

... and we need to explain that, we need to explain why we don't tell people with simple acute pain that All Pain Is In The Brain -- it's not because it's any less true for them, it's just that for most people most of the time they don't need to worry about that level of detail. But if you don't explain that, it sure do sound a lot like "your pain isn't real (unlike those people over there)".

Lies-to-children. That. That thing. That's a thing I need to explain.

Comments

[batrachian]

I have seen it phrased in programmer-type spaces as "leaky abstractions"; put the important pieces in a way you can hold onto them, and elide the "unimportant". the map is not the territory... but that means making decisions about what to include (and what not).

And then you (generic) run into a weird edge case, mutter "it shouldn't be doing that", and find out that something in that black-box API works as expected... for "normal" input.

... the point of this got away from me.