Can Money Ease Your Pain South Carolina?

Category: Pain Care Center

We came across a study recently that had us incredibly interested, but maybe more so for entertainment value than scientific value. Can holding cold, hard cash literally in the palm of your hand help to relieve your pain? While we spend our lives staying on top of the latest chronic pain trends here at First Choice Healthcare, these more alternative approaches are very interesting.

The Money Study was conducted recently at the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management to see if handling money has an effect on pain tolerance.  Can just holding money be empowering?

According to LiveScience.com, through six experiments, psychologists and a marketing professor probed the power of money as a proxy for social acceptance. Among their results, they found that merely touching bills or thinking about expenses paid affected the participants both physically and emotionally.

Because it affects pain, money may be a clue to how the brain evolved to process social interactions, the researchers wrote in a paper published in the June edition of the journal Psychological Science.

The students who participated in the study went through many different experiments, including holding cash and then going through a set of tasks proposed to induce stress. Tasks like playing a video game that was rigged, or writing an essay about the amount of money they spent in the past, and then even dipping their fingers into hot water. After all of the tests were completed, the researchers found that those who had handled money in the beginning felt less pain and less stress during the tests.

Consumer psychologist and study lead Kathleen Vohs told Discovery.com, “When people are reminded of money in a subtle manner by counting out hard currency, they experience painful situations as being not very painful.”

We all are well aware that money makes the world go ‘round, but does it also have such an intense affect on us as to control our pain management and stress levels? Further experiments seemed to show that people “who feel rejected or physically hurt have a higher desire for money than those who don’t.”

Money is a powerful thing, and according to the researchers at the University of Minnesota, it also has the power to influence pain management. According to LiveScience.com, Its physical effects may be tied up in the early evolution of those social interactions. Earlier research by psychologists Geoff MacDonald at the University of Toronto and Mark Leary at Duke University has showed a link between psychological pain and physical pain. The emerging hypothesis is that early in the evolution of social interactions, our brains took a shortcut to handle the new system: instead of laying down new biological hardware to process things like relationships and culture, human brains hacked their older hardware that deals with physical pain and gave it the double duty of handling social interactions.

While the studies are still completely experimental and highly controversial, if we can take a step back and register how money affects us, maybe it will assist in relieving our stress and thus help in pain management. This is our challenge to you; based on this recent report and what you know about the power of money; consider how money affects your life and your stress levels. Could you financial situation right now, during these rough economic times, be increasing your chronic pain?