Time magazine recently reported that a landmark study on pain found that, of the millions of Americans suffering from chronic pain, the vast majority come from lower-income households.

“Americans in households making less than $30,000 a year spend nearly 20 percent of their lives in moderate to severe pain, compared with less than 8 percent of people in households earning above $100,000 … The findings, published Thursday in the British journal the Lancet, also found that participants who hadn’t finished high school reported feeling twice the amount of pain as college graduates.”

Well I’ll be. Let me get a chair so I can sit down and recover from the shock.

I mean seriously, some of these studies have to make you laugh. DUUUHHHHH! I have no doubt that a quarter of a million Americans are suffering from daily pain - why do you think our market is flooded with every painkiller imaginable? Why are there so many people addicted to narcotics like Vicodin and Percocet? I mean, is it really a big surprise that the people suffering the most are the people who aren’t making that much money? These are the people with jobs that require physical labor, and these are also the people who have untold stress in their lives when it comes to paying their bills.

Well, I guess this is good news for the makers of Advil, Tylenol, Bayer, Alleve, Vicodin, Percocet, Tramadol, Codeine, and all the rest. My question is, how long can we keep popping pills to make our pain go away? Aren’t we only masking the symptoms of a larger problem?