When the pain is great enough, we will let anyone be doctor.
If I found the cure for dystrophy tomorrow, I would do a telethon in four weeks for acute pain that in this country is a bigger problem than cancer, heart, sickle cell, anemia, name it. It is - it's hitting 70 million Americans.
On my left knee I have a long scar from an ACL operation. I've had both knees reconstructed.
It has been said that time heals all wounds. I don't agree. The wounds remain. Time - the mind, protecting its sanity - covers them with some scar tissue and the pain lessens, but it is never gone.
The cure for pain is in the pain.
It's not that I don't suffer, it's that I know the unimportance of suffering. I know that pain is to be fought and thrown aside, not to be accepted as part of one's soul and as a permanent scar across one's view of existence.
I have given a name to my pain, and call it "dog".
If I'm going to have to deal, as I get older, with arthritic pain, I don't want to get into opiates.
The only antidote to mental suffering is physical pain.
Social reform is the desperate decision to remove corns from a person suffering from cancer.
Don't run if you can walk. Don't walk if you can stand. Don't stand if you can sit. Don't sit if you can lie down.
Many times drugs and alcohol - there's a technical term that they're called, emotional suppressants - are the only things that can help a person survive and get through and be able to deal with their pain.
Find a place inside where there's joy, and the joy will burn out the pain.
I don't mind getting old except for the pain. I have two new knees, so going downstairs is not perfect. Nobody tells you about the pain.
I've had extraordinary good luck with my health, other than a broken elbow.
Do back exercises. Pain is distracting.
I've played with a lot of injuries.
I've been very fortunate with injuries: I've had the odd broken bone in my back; when I was starting out here in England, I cracked a few ribs, and I've broken a bone in my hand.
I know that there are people who believe that if they get to the stage where life is absolutely intolerable because of pain and indignity... they would like to end their life before nature intended, and we think they should have the choice to do so.
There is only one effective antidote for mental suffering and that is physical pain.
I can manage my own pain. I can drink. I can go to the doctor and get a prescription. I can exercise. I can write a story about it. I've done it a million times! But I don't want to see the people I love tortured and suffering.
The patient says, "Doctor, it hurts when I do this." "Then don't do that!"
When I came to this country in 1958, to be a dying patient in a medical hospital was a nightmare. You were put in the last room, furthest away from the nurses' station. You were full of pain, but they wouldn't give you morphine. Nobody told you that you were full of cancer and that it was understandable that you had pain and needed medication.
Pain is not the same as suffering. Left to itself, the body discharges pain spontaneously, letting go of it the moment that the underlying cause is healed. Suffering is pain that we hold on to. It comes from the mind’s mysterious instinct to believe that pain is good, or that it cannot be escaped, or that the person deserves it.
Delaying gratification is a process of scheduling the pain and pleasure of life in such a way as to enhance the pleasure by meeting and experiencing the pain first and getting it over with. It is the only decent way to live.
