Workers can’t avoid it while the rich who work out can
Millions of Employees in Chronic Pain
| Too many people work too much, don't make enough, and live in sickening environments. So charge polluters, don't tax earnings, and share society's surplus so people can extend and enjoy leisure. We reprint this 2008 article from TIME on May 2. |
By Kathleen Kingsbury
Americans in households making less than $30,000 a year spend nearly 20% of their lives in moderate to severe pain, compared with less than 8% of people in households earning above $100,000, according to a landmark study on how Americans experience in pain.The findings, published in the British journal the Lancet, also found that participants who hadn't finished high school reported feeling twice the amount of pain as college graduates.
"To a significant extent, pain does separate the classes," says Princeton economist Alan Krueger, who authored the study along with Dr. Arthur Stone, a psychiatry professor at Stony Brook University.
Krueger notes that the type of pain people reported typically fell on either side of the rich-poor divide. "Those with higher incomes welcome pain almost by choice, usually through exercise," he says. "At lower incomes, pain comes as the result of work."
Krueger and Stone found that blue-collar workers felt more pain, from physical labor or repetitive motion, while on the job than off, which at least offers hope that the problem can be mitigated. This finding "emphasizes the need for pain preventing measures [in the workplace] such as better ergonomics," wrote Juha H.O. Turunen, a professor of social pharmacy at Finland's University of Kuopio, in an accompanying commentary to the report.
JJS: It also emphasizes the need for time off from work, with an income, so people can recover and turn their attention to other activities important in life. People could recuperate and enjoy life if they got an income apart from work, such as a dividend paid to citizens from surplus public revenue collected by fees or taxes on rents, on the values of land, resources, EM spectrum, and ecosystem services.
Kingsbury: People with chronic pain also worked less, the new study found, costing US businesses as much as $60 billion annually. These conclusions are in line with previous studies on productivity lost to common pain conditions, including a 2003 report finding that nearly 15% of the US workforce's output was diminished by ailments such as headaches and arthritis.
What's new in Kruger and Stone's study, however, is the level of detail with which the researchers were able to chronicle the lives of Americans in pain. With the help of the polling firm Gallup, they asked nearly 4,000 survey participants to diarize their daily activities over a 24-hour period. From these personal accounts, the researchers saw the impact pain had on people's emotional states.
Though participants said interacting with a spouse or friend lowered their pain, those suffering chronic pain tended to socialize much less. They also spent a lot more time watching television, about 25% of their day compared with 16% for the average person.
Pain also appeared to be a major driver of healthcare costs. Krueger and Stone found that Americans spent about $2.6 billion in over-the-counter pain medications and another nearly $14 billion on outpatient analgesics in 2004, the most recent data available.
But in these numbers, too, there may be a distinction between the haves and the have-nots. A 2005 study in Michigan showed that minorities and the poor have less access to such drugs than wealthier Americans because local pharmacies don't stock enough pain medications such as oxycodone or morphine. "Those [pharmacies] in white ZIP codes were more than 13 times more likely to have sufficient supplies," says lead researcher Dr. Carmen Green, an anesthesiology professor at the University of Michigan. "I have patients who have to drive 30 miles or more just to get their pain medications."
One characteristic that pain doesn't seem to distinguish is gender: according to Krueger and Stone's study, men and women were nearly equally likely to find themselves in pain.
Another is age. People reported more aches and pains as they got older, though surprisingly that pain tended to plateau from ages 45 to 75. "Maybe people reach a point in their career where they move up the ladder into a desk job," Krueger says. "Or maybe they've just learned how to cope with the pain."
JJS: Given that the pain is work related, and so much work is not to produce wealth but to conform to norms in order to be paid -- like telephone solicitors who annoy people during dinner – eliminating senseless work could alleviate excess pain. But before people could enjoy life pain-free, first they must demand a heavy dose of social justice and replace taxes and subsidies with a fair sharing of society’s surplus -- all the money we spend on all the nature we use.
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Jeffery J. Smith runs the Forum on Geonomics.
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Also see: Racketeering: The "Doctor Prevention" Subsidy
Are Americans "Vacation Starved" ?
Why Prescription Drugs Cost So Much |
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