Thanking God for the blessing of pain

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Today is Thursday, April 15th.

This is WORLD Radio and we thank you for listening!

Good morning. I’m Mary Reichard.

MEGAN BASHAM, HOST: And I’m Megan Basham.

Coming next on The World and Everything in It: A medical missionary’s legacy. In 1914, an English couple serving in India welcomed a baby boy named Paul Brand. Little did they know he’d grow up and achieve world renown for his innovative techniques to treat leprosy.

REICHARD: Dr. Brand’s work also led to some surprising conclusions about pain. Detecting pain is normal body business for most of us, but Dr. Brand understood some that some people have to think about pain—because it’s absent for them. WORLD Senior Correspondent Kim Henderson brings us his story.

SPEECH INTRODUCTION: I first met Dr. Brand in India. And it’s a great honor and privilege to introduce you and to welcome you here. And we all look forward very much to your presentation. [APPLAUSE]
BRAND: Thank you very much…

KIM HENDERSON, SENIOR CORRESPONDENT: Paul Brand devoted his career to improving the lives of people diagnosed with leprosy, which today is known as Hansen’s Disease.

BRAND: When I went to India, I went to teach surgery at the Christian Medical College…

While he was a surgeon in India, Brand proved that nearly every injury leprosy patients sustain is related to their insensitivity to pain. You’ve probably seen pictures of what happens when someone suffers from leprosy—the seemingly lost toes and fingers. They’re actually deformed from wounds and contractures. Brand tried to describe to audiences the associated stigma.

BRAND: Just as a person who can’t feel, thinks of his own limb as being dead, so other people looking at the way he behaves think of him who is dying by inches. In India, they call leprosy, the “creeping death.”

YANCEY: My name is Phillip Yancey, and I was privileged to spend almost 10 years in writing with Doctor Paul Brand. 

Author Phillip Yancey became interested in Brand’s work in 1976, back when Yancey was a young journalist.

YANCEY: I just called him up out of the blue because I came across a pamphlet he had written on pain. He had a different perspective on pain than anyone I’ve ever met. He said, “Thank God for pain. If I had only one gift I could give to my leprosy patients, it would be the gift of pain.” I had never heard anybody thank God for pain. 

Yancey drove to Louisiana, where Dr. Brand was conducting his research at the national leprosarium. He watched as the doctor demonstrated why some of his patients were going blind.  

YANCEY: We all have little pain cells in our eye. Whenever our eye gets a little dry, that pain cell signals subconsciously, “You’ve got to blink, you’ve got to blink,” and we do — about 28,000 times a day.

But people without those pain cells can’t sense the need to blink, so they don’t. Brand’s wife, Margaret, an ophthalmologist, developed techniques to help people with leprosy.

YANCEY: “If you stop blinking, you may go blind. If you keep blinking, I can almost assure you that I can keep you seeing,” she would tell her patients.

BRETT: Sometimes when I’m going to medical appointments and I’ll mention Dr. Brand, the doctors will light up: “Oh, Dr. Brand, he was incredible…”

Anne Brett knew the Brands. Her leprosy legacy spans both sides of her family.

BRETT: My dad said that Dr. Paul Brand was the closest thing to Jesus Christ he ever met…

Paul Brand operated on her mother’s hands, which were drawn inward from the disease. He pioneered tendon transfer surgeries for patients just like her.

Anne Brett observed firsthand the important part pain plays in our lives. Her mother had lost much of her pain sensitivity.

BRETT: So she would put like almost boiling water in the sink. And one time it was so hot, the gloves melted on her fingers, and she didn’t even know it… 

Even washing a crystal vase could be dangerous.

BRETT: She looked down into the sink, and the sink had blood in it. And when she lifted her arms, she had cut her tendon and she didn’t know it.

Brand taught leprosy patients—and others—how to prevent problems in the absence of pain’s warning signals.

Those decades-ago discoveries have a direct impact today on John Figarola. He works to rehabilitate patients at the National Hansen’s Disease Program in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

FIGAROLA: This is our shoe shop, and in this area is where we actually fabricate orthotics. We mold orthotics. You’ll see an oven that you use to heat the material…

Some of his patients need special insoles for their shoes or splints for their fingers. Nerve damage from leprosy has left them vulnerable.    

FIGAROLA: Teach them to inspect their hands every day. Because untreated, a simple wound could actually lead to a bone infection and cause them to lose the tips of the fingers, even a hand or foot. 

Philip Yancey says former U.S. Surgeon General Dr. C. Everett Koop also recognized Dr. Brand’s contributions.

YANCEY: Dr. Koop told me that he had insisted on continuing funding for the leprosarium, even though there were very few people in the United States who had leprosy, because he said what Dr. Brand had discovered about pain applied in many diseases that cause anesthesia.

That’s right. The inability to distinguish pain isn’t just a problem for leprosy patients. Diabetes can also cause nerve damage. Brand realized it’s undetected injuries and stress, not wounds that won’t heal, that lead to amputations for diabetics.

Here he is giving a speech on the subject just two years before his death in 2003.

BRAND: And we were able to prove by these foot pad experiments, that the number of steps per day are really more important and how much stress each step makes.

Brand’s findings changed the lives of many people living with diabetes.

YANCEY: Dr. Coop told me that Dr. Brand’s discoveries probably saved about 50 to 70 thousand amputations a year in the United States. 

Brand didn’t just study the property of pain from a medical perspective, though. He wrestled with it theologically, eventually writing this conclusion: “God designed the human body so that it is able to survive because of pain.” Thus, it’s a gift.

And while Brand’s work benefited the masses, both Philip Yancey and Anne Brett say his one-on-one approach with patients was unforgettably Christlike.

Brett has a story to back that up. Dr. Brand was on stage at a celebration:

BRETT: And one of the patients—he was in a wheelchair—and he wanted to shake hands with Dr. Brand. And Dr. Brand came over, and it’s a simple thing, but he came over and he knelt down and bent over to shake hands with this patient. They truly loved the patients.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Kim Henderson in South Louisiana.

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