Subjective and Objective Consequences of Injury

A broken bone is tangible and measurable and recordable, as is the process of knitting it back together. It is respectable. But the subjective results—shifts in how we process pain, inflammatory loops that just don't go away, loss of confidence, changes in how we organize ourselves—are not so well-respected. In their article on the psychosocial aspects of recovery, Weisman and Masharawi point out that some things we now see as subjective are becoming measurable: nociceptive apparatus dysfunction, self-directed inflammatory activity maintained by positive feedback loops, microglial autocrine signaling; neuroimmune coupling; glial-neuronal interactions.... these @#!-ups are starting to be measurable. And once they are measurable, objective, they manage to slide through the mesh in Descartes' cage. Same event, but suddenly they are respect-worthy. And perhaps 'treatable' in the western medicine sense.