Positive Thinking Dulls the Pain

Mental attitudes make a difference—sometimes a big one, according to Esther Yakobov, a doctoral student in clinical psychology at McGill University in Montreal. She found that people who blame others for their suffering and experience life as being unfair to them experience more pain after knee replacement surgery than do those with a different outlook.

Yakobov told Kathryn Doyle, writing for Reuters Health, that “Studies conducted with patients who suffer from chronic pain because of an injury demonstrated that individuals who judge their experience as unfair, focus on their losses, and blame others for their painful condition also tend to experience more pain and recover from their injuries slower than individuals who do not.”

In the recent study Yakobov studied patients whose disability resulted not from an injury but osteoarthritis. Her subjects were 116 men and women, all of whom had severe osteoarthritis, were between the ages of 50 and 85 and were scheduled for knee replacement surgery in Canada.

Before their surgery they each filled out questionnaires that measured their feelings of perceived injustice. The rated their agreement with statements such as “It all seems so unfair, ” and “I am suffering because of somebody else’s negligence.” Another questionnaire measured their pain levels.

All of the participants’ knee surgeries were successful and after one year the researchers tested them again. Doyle reported that, “The more a patient agreed before surgery that life seems unfair and others are to blame for their problems, the more pain they reported experiencing one year after surgery. That was true even when age, sex, other health conditions and pre-surgery pain levels were accounted for.”

Victoria Brander, M.D., a physical medicine and rehabilitation specialist at Northwestern Orthopaedic Institute in Chicago, commented on the study. “All of these psychological factors point to the fact that patients who perceive themselves as helpless, those who are afraid, those who feel loss of control, have a more difficult time, ” She noted that the opposite was also true, that people who are self-confident and secure in their own ability to achieve a goal appear to recover more rapidly from knee replacement surgery.