What is Suffering?

Important Questions about Living and Dying

There are many definitions of suffering. Irish-American physician and author, Michael Kearney, describes suffering as soul pain.

Buddhism in particular addresses it: “Buddha called suffering a holy truth,” writes Thich Nhat Hanh in The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching.“When we use the word ‘suffering’ in Buddhism, we mean the kind of suffering that can show us the way out.” In Christianity, Jesus suffered on the cross so the rest of us wouldn’t have to.

“Most generally, suffering can be defined as the state of severe distress associated with events that threaten the intactness of the person,” wrote Eric Cassel in 1982 in a now-canonical article for The New England Journal of Medicine. Person not merely body.

One way or another you might think of suffering as a gap inside oneself — a wedge between the reality one has and the reality one wishes for. Take a minute to think about your own experiences — a time when the world just wouldn’t cooperate and you found yourself bristling at your situation. It is no easy task to welcome the reality you have, and equally tricky to try to change it.

In other words, we suffer when who we are doesn’t jive with what we’re experiencing. That could be pain, nausea, anxiety, immobility, communication breakdown, loneliness — whatever condition you don’t want to be in, but are.

How the Medical Industry Can Contribute to Suffering

Let’s be clear about something: Medicine will never be entirely free of pain. Medications have side effects and most procedures entail risk. But medicine also creates unnecessary suffering. How? Through lapses in communication that harm the patient to life-changing test results sitting in an inbox for weeks to gaps in insurance coverage to being offered procedures that have a slim to nil chance of working and great odds of causing more suffering.

Illness and death hurt. That’s part of life’s package deal. But they don’t have to hurt as much as they do today. When our problems are beyond fixing — “There’s nothing more we can do” is what we’ll often hear — it can seem like health care stops caring about us altogether.

Our disease may be incurable, but that doesn’t mean the case is closed. What about health care’s duty to see a fellow human being through the existential pain of a disease that won’t quit?