🔁 The Scapegoating of Pain: How Medicine, Meaning, and Identity Collide
When pain shows up without a clear cause, we panic — and medicine often reaches for easy scapegoats. “Bone on bone.” “Degeneration.” “Instability.” These labels offer comfort through certainty, but they can quietly erode a person’s confidence, identity, and sense of agency. We trade complexity for simplicity, and in doing so, the body becomes the villain.
But what if pain isn’t a crime scene… and the body isn’t the criminal?
This post explores how the search for answers in pain care mirrors ancient scapegoating rituals, where uncertainty is offloaded onto something we can name — even if it’s wrong. It challenges the biomechanical myths still dominant in medicine and offers a new path: one that honors complexity, restores trust, and rewrites the story from “I am broken” to “I am adapting.”