Physical pain is not merely a private struggle. Pain is also a 
problem of representation and trust, of rights and responsibilities, 
and a source of tension between individual and community. Perhaps not 
surprisingly, efforts to manage it give rise to a chronic American 
condition: an intimate, unknowable experience co-opted by special 
interests. Pain, in short, is political.

That is the argument Keith Wailoo, a Princeton historian of medicine 
and public policy scholar, makes in Pain: A Political History, which 
sets out to show "how the powerful question of other people's pain 
became a recurring site for political battle."

"unquenchable appetite for relief"

http://clbb.mgh.harvard.edu/who-has-a-right-to-pain-relief/?utm_source=September+2014+newsletter&utm_campaign=September+2014+newsletter&utm_medium=email

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/08/do-people-in-pain-have-a-right-to-relief/375948/

www.peoplewho.org