> Pain science is a very well-researched field that gets plenty of funding and is worked on by some of the best scientists and doctors in the world who have no corrupt agenda.
Perhaps, but there is a fundamental problem with a purely scientific approach to a problem like this.
Science has a measurement problem when it comes to pain. You can take an entirely disciplined approach to studying the problem but there is no way to measure pain that isn't subjective on the part of the patient. There's no way to separate actual pain from psychosomatic pain, no matter how good the scientists and doctors are or how non-corrupted their agendas. It's only when you start to realize that pain is primarily a mental illness, not a physical one, that can even begin to understand it. And that's a conclusion that is very difficult to reach from a purely scientific perspective, especially since you can cause pain so easily through physiological means. I've only been able to arrive at that point through my own subjective experience in seeing just how effective an approach based on disciplined thought can be.
You know what's also a very well-researched field that gets plenty of funding and is worked on by some of the best scientists and doctors in the world? Depression. And, like pain, depression is a condition that can only be measured subjectively by the patient. Scientists can (and have) deluded themselves into thinking they're measuring it more accurately, with fMRI scans and other non-subjective physiological responses, but it's just as likely they're measuring second-order responses in the brain rather than the primary symptoms.
And, like pain killers, those doctors and scientists largely favored an approach using medication, since that approach is most amenable to being studied scientifically. But what's been realized in the past decade is that medication is no more effective than mindfulness practice, despite having significantly more side effects. And, even more recently, there's now pretty good evidence that depression may not even be a problem of the mind and, instead, may be primarily a problem in a patient's gut bacteria. Scientists, in their belief that everything mental originates in the brain, have very possibly misunderstood for decades the basic nature of the problem they were studying.
Science isn't magic. It's a way of refining our thinking on a subject, but it doesn't automatically arrive at correct conclusions when those conclusions are difficult to conceive. My personal experience with pain leads me to believe this is one of these situations. It's no knock against scientists, but given the damage that we're seeing from the side effects of pain medications, I do believe it's long past time to expand the scope of the problem they're studying.