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The fact that chronic pain is so well correlated with aging suggests that for the majority of people there is some underlying physical degeneration coupled with a culturally/psychologically mediated experience of pain. It's possible we're spreading cultural memes about aging that causes old people to hyperfixate on minor and aches and pains but the cultural universality of old people's body's hurting makes that seem iffy to me. It could be that technological advances of having pain treatments available primes people to fixate on total pain alleviation and medical treatments while past generations would simply learned to tolerate the unchangeable pain.
I know an old hippie lady who had chronic back pain that kept her in bed a lot. She loves to tell the story of how she 'cured' it by meditating intensely, talking to the pain in the form of a wol, and fully internalizing the idea that it was a part of her body trying to protect her not a sign she was being harmed. She's relatively mobile in day to day life and in some sense was healed, but she's still an old lady and moves gingerly and there's no way she could work in a warehouse or something. That's to say that there's substantial mobility and pain reduction to be gained through psychologically and culturally mediating pain like that but, not infinite improvement in most cases. Even when pain has identifiable biological causes there's still a lot of reduction that can be accomplished through psychological means.
Not necessarily. Perhaps it suggests that "everyone knows" chronic pain is well correlated with ageing, so only old people can overcome the subconscious suspension of disbelief and delude themselves that they have it.
In the same way that no Malaysian-Chinese women worry about penis theft. It's all in their heads, but the scenario in their heads has boundaries.
Maybe with the propagation of gender theory Malaysian-Chinese women start worrying about that. After all, if you can become a woman just by declaring it, why can't you identify as a woman whose penis has been stolen? Moreover, the same ideology would require the doctors, on the pain of being fired and de-licensed, to treat such cases as the actual disappearance of the actual penis. You can't contradict somebody's living experience!
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