BENEFICIAL PAIN

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 20110, 31 March 1928, Page 14 (Supplement)

BENEFICIAL PAIN

NATURE’S WARNING Without pain life would be impossible. It is the warning that something is wrong, and if we had no such sensation we shou dlallow injuries and diseases, which might easily be cured at the outset, to be neglected until they killed us (writes Michael Temple in rhe October London Magazine)Let me take one very striking instance. Until quite recently it appeared to be impossible to give any adequate reason for the often excruciating pain of toothache, for it seemed an extravagant abuse of our capacity for sensation to give such a violent warning to attend to such a small lesion; it was like hitting a man over the head in order to remind him to get his hair cut. But we have learned of late that bad teeth are not the trifles we once supposed, but are the cause of some of the most distressing complaints under which we suffer, and that the most emphatic warning to see to them at once is just whai is imperatively needed.

When nature invented a toothache, she was not afflicting us with a meaningless curse, but was endowing us with a blessing in disguise, and was working on much sounder lines than our own science has done until comparatively recent years.