Pain’s Neuroscientization: Plasticity Discourses and the Twinned Imperative/Opportunity to Optimize, Enhance, and Self-Surveil

• In Event: 3129 - Section on Medical Sociology Refereed Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 18. Medicalization

Abstract

In response to both the opioid-related overdose crisis and a proliferation of neuroscientific understandings of pathology, pain is being newly biomedicalized, or neuroscientized. Neuroscientific understandings of pain create the potential for pain patients to see themselves and their bodies in new and different ways, repositioning responsibility for suffering from the health care system to the patient. Neural discourses invariably carry with them notions of plasticity, wherein patients are encouraged to think of themselves as malleable, capable of transformation and enhancement. Pain patients are being trained in techniques that help them to self-monitor and self-surveil, thereby steering their perceptions of their pain towards “healthy connections” that will minimize their risk for developing and maintaining chronic pain. As chronic pain is framed as increasingly risky in light of the opioid crisis, the imperative to guard against this risk by engaging in “healthy” neural regulation is all the more heightened. Further, this framing of the brain as plastic and malleable produces particular subjectivities, namely pain patients who are both capable of, and responsible for, managing their own conditions. Thus, a neuroscientific configuration of pain places the onus of care on the patient, rather than on the health care system. This chapter describes the twinned imperative/opportunity embedded within these neural techniques, highlighting the complexities inherent in the subjectivities produced by their proliferation.

Author

• Sara Rubin, University of California-San Francisco