"How much does it hurt?" can be translated, according to recent research, into "How old do you feel?" The L.A. Times reports that researchers at the San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center studied data from 18,531 people ages 50 and older who took part in the 2004 Health and Retirement Study. The scientists asked people whether they were
often troubled by pain and if the pain was mild, moderate or severe.
They also asked about physical limitations in terms of mobility, stair climbing, upper-body tasks and daily living activities such as bathing, dressing and eating. Those (one fourth of all people questioned) who suffered from significant pain had the functionality of people who were 20 to 30 years older who didn’t suffer
from substantial pain. About a third of people ages 50 to 59 who were
in pain, for example, said they could climb several flights of stairs
without difficulty, compared with 39 percent of people 80 to 89 who weren't in
pain. Study participants ages 50 to 59 who had pain also had higher
rates of dependence and difficulty with daily tasks than people 80 to
89 who didn't have pain.
Read more in the Los Angeles Times.
Read an abstract from the study in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society .
I am a forty-three year old hemophiliac with two artificial knees, arthritis in both ankles and bone grinding on bone in my right arm. Can’t afford the supplementary insurance or the twenty percent Medicare doesn’t cover to get it fixed (God bless the health care industry). So it’s pretty much ‘stiff upper lip’ time. All of that, well, it hurts a little. I spend my days trying to write the next great fantasy/scifi novel while fighting through a haze of oxycontin and oxycodone both to which I am mildly addicted (which is another battle alltogether). My days start slowly, but by two or three in the afternoon, I am up and out and doing something physical despite the pain. I work on maintaining and improving the house, I go for hikes in the mountains; whatever it takes to be mobile. Once a person in pain becomes sedentary, they might as well put down roots in the sofa and plug into their TV’s, and it is that which makes people with chronic pain old.
I agree with much you say and just wanted to comment. I am 37 years old, 6’8″ 330lbs, which seems to apply to everything else. I broke my back loose from my pelvis 10 years ago, had a pineapple sized blod clot (infarction) in my left lung last year, and now starting to have kidney stones, and battle arthritis and Reflex Sympathy Syndrome(my nervous system acts haywire sometimes-a mild ding becomes an entire swelled leg and I can’t walk for a month or so). Anyway, I totally agree. The times I am forced to be sedentary(way too often), I feel 80 years old and plug into couch as you said. I do, however, feel completely renewed everytime I am able to have a decent day involving SOME kind of physical activity. I live for those days now instead of wishing I were dead on the bad days. Point is that pain ABSOLUTELY makes you much older than the numbers of age suggest, and it is up to the individual to not get stuck permanently BEING 30 years older.