This is a discussion of a paper “Education and the Prevalence of Pain” by Thomas Miller in The American: “What You Don’t Know Can Hurt You”

Health policy researchers Steven Atlas and Jonathan Skinner report in a just-released National Bureau of Economic Research working paper that levels of education exerted a strong impact on changes in the pain experienced by older patients with lower back pain and sciatica over a ten-year period.

For example,

The authors looked at a group of people who had herniated discs, many of whom underwent surgery for it. Then looked at them ten years later.

they find that for those patients who were college graduates, just 9 percent of them reported leg or back pain “always” or “almost always” after 10 years, compared to 34 percent of those patients who lacked a high school degree. Of course, this sort of research finding remains preliminary, and some further statistical adjustments could squeeze that gap between the highest and lowest education groups. Atlas and Skinner examine other possible factors (such as occupation, industry, marital status, brain structure, social norms, and disability payment incentives) in the differences in the resolution of pain over time, despite objective evidence for the same underlying clinical condition, across the overall group of patients studied. However, the differences in pain outcomes by education seem to hold across the entire distribution of disabling pain (from little to mild to moderate to severe).

This latest research is particularly interesting when placed in the larger context of earlier findings of a strong association between educational attainment and health, by such scholars as Angus Deaton, Adriana Lleras-Muney, and David Cutler; Michael Grossman; and Robert Kaestner. Just last month, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Commission to Build a Healthier America emphasized the importance of education in early childhood development and lifetime health.

Another example of the effect of education on pain perception.

Among 50-59 year females, for example, pain rates ranged from 26 percent for college graduates to 55 percent for those without a high school degree. Occupation, industry, and marital status attenuated but did not erase these educational gradients

Why would education affect the way pain is felt? Leave your comment below.