Getting Used to Torture, and What Surgery Has to Do With It

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Human beings are strange little adaptation machines. Put us in a noisy apartment, and after a week the upstairs neighbor’s midnight chair-dragging becomes “ambience.” Give us a phone with a cracked screen, and by Tuesday we are swiping around the fracture like archaeologists preserving an ancient ruin. Place us in repeated discomfort, stress, fear, or pain, and the mind often begins doing what it does best: it adjusts.

That adjustment can be useful. It helps soldiers function under pressure, parents survive toddler sleep schedules, and medical interns remain upright after the third consecutive night of hospital coffee that tastes like it has legal representation. But adaptation has a darker side. People can become used to suffering that should never have become normal. Institutions can grow comfortable around pain. And in medicine, especially surgery, the line between necessary suffering and avoidable harm has always required constant moral maintenance.

The phrase “getting used to torture” is not meant to flatten every form of pain into the same category. Torture is deliberate cruelty. Surgery, at its best, is consent-based healing. One violates the body to break a person; the other enters the body to repair, remove, reconstruct, relieve, or save. Yet both force us to confront the same uncomfortable question: how do people, professionals, and systems learn to live with pain in front of them?

The Human Brain Is Built to Adapt, Even When It Should Protest

Pain is not just a simple alarm bell. It is more like a full emergency broadcast system operated by the body, the brain, past experience, mood, memory, expectation, and context. A sprained ankle on a hiking trail feels different when you are alone, in the rain, and your phone battery is at 3 percent than it does in a clinic with a calm doctor and an X-ray machine nearby. Same tissue, different story.

Over time, people can become less reactive to repeated stressors. That is sometimes called habituation. A stimulus that once felt overwhelming may become familiar. The nervous system says, in effect, “We have seen this movie before.” This is why the first day in a hospital can feel terrifying to a new medical student, while an experienced nurse can move through alarms, monitors, tubes, and urgent voices with steady focus. Familiarity can reduce panic.

But there is a catch, because of course there is. The human body apparently read the manual and then added footnotes in red ink. Repeated exposure to pain does not always make people tougher. In some cases, it can make the nervous system more sensitive. Chronic pain can persist even after tissue has healed. The brain may keep amplifying signals, like a smoke detector that continues screaming long after the toast has been removed. This process is one reason medicine now treats pain as biological, emotional, and socialnot merely as a complaint to be endured with a heroic jawline.

Why “Getting Used to It” Can Be Dangerous

There is a cultural myth that suffering automatically builds character. Sometimes hardship does teach resilience, patience, and perspective. Sometimes it teaches the body to brace, the mind to dissociate, and the soul to keep receipts. Not all endurance is growth. Sometimes it is survival wearing a motivational poster costume.

When people get used to mistreatment, they may stop expecting better. A patient with years of poorly controlled pain may enter a surgeon’s office apologizing for “complaining,” even while their daily life has shrunk to a few rooms and a heating pad. A medical trainee may accept exhaustion and humiliation as “just how training works.” A family caregiver may normalize burnout because love has been quietly confused with never needing help.

This is where the word torture becomes morally usefulnot as a casual exaggeration, but as a warning label. Torture is the intentional use of suffering to dominate. Medicine is supposed to do the opposite. Medicine should reduce suffering, respect dignity, and restore agency. If a medical system begins treating pain as background noise, it risks becoming fluent in the wrong language.

Surgery: The Ethical Exception That Proves the Rule

Surgery is one of civilization’s most dramatic moral agreements. A patient allows another human being to cut, cauterize, remove, repair, drain, replace, or rearrange tissue. In any other setting, that sentence would require police tape. In the operating room, it may be the most compassionate thing available.

The difference is not the instrument. It is the purpose, the consent, the safeguards, the skill, and the relationship. A scalpel is not ethical by itself. Neither is a white coat. Surgery becomes legitimate because the patient is informed, the goal is therapeutic, the team is trained, anesthesia and pain control are used, and the expected benefits justify the risks. That is why informed consent is not a decorative clipboard ritual. It is the moral doorway into surgery.

Informed consent means the patient should understand what condition is being treated, what operation is proposed, what risks exist, what alternatives are available, and what might happen during recovery. It also means the patient can ask questions, express fear, and decline. The signature matters, but the conversation matters more. A signed form without understanding is not a magic spell. It is just paper with better posture.

The History of Surgery Is Also the History of Refusing Pain

Before modern anesthesia, surgery was often fast, brutal, and limited by what a conscious person could withstand. The surgeon’s speed was prized because pain placed a ceiling on possibility. A successful operation required not only technical skill but also the patient’s capacity to endure terror and agony. That history should make modern medicine gratefuland a little humble.

The public demonstration of ether anesthesia in 1846 is often treated as a turning point in surgical history because it changed what surgery could be. The operating room slowly became less of a battlefield against time and more of a controlled environment where anatomy, physiology, pharmacology, and teamwork could cooperate. Anesthesia did not make surgery simple. It made many forms of humane surgery possible.

Today, anesthesia includes general anesthesia, regional anesthesia, local anesthesia, and sedation. These tools do more than “knock someone out.” They block pain signals, reduce awareness, relax the body, support safe operating conditions, and allow clinicians to monitor vital signs while the surgeon works. In a good operating room, pain is not a test of character. It is a clinical problem to prevent, measure, and treat.

Modern Pain Control Is Not About Erasing Every Sensation

Here is a fact that surprises many patients: after surgery, the goal is not always zero pain. Zero pain sounds wonderful, like a luxury spa run by angels with excellent insurance coverage. But chasing absolute pain elimination can increase risks, especially when powerful medications are involved. The better goal is functional comfort: enough pain control for breathing deeply, walking safely, sleeping, eating, participating in physical therapy, and healing.

Postoperative pain care now often uses a multimodal approach. That may include acetaminophen, anti-inflammatory medications when appropriate, local anesthetics, nerve blocks, epidurals, ice, positioning, movement plans, relaxation strategies, and, when needed, short-term opioids. The point is to attack pain from several angles instead of asking one medication to perform a solo concert with fireworks.

The opioid crisis made this conversation more complicated. Undertreating pain is cruel. Overtreating with high-risk medication can also harm. Good surgical care sits in the uncomfortable but necessary middle: listen seriously, prescribe thoughtfully, set expectations clearly, adjust when needed, and never treat a patient’s pain report as an inconvenience.

What Torture Survivors Can Teach Medicine About the Body

People who have survived torture, persecution, detention, or severe violence may enter medical settings with layers of fear that are invisible on a standard intake form. A blood pressure cuff, a locked door, a rushed exam, exposure of the body, loss of control, bright lights, or a clinician standing too close may trigger intense distress. The medical team may see “noncompliance.” The patient may be reliving danger.

This is where trauma-informed care becomes essential. It asks clinicians to explain before touching, ask permission whenever possible, offer choices, preserve privacy, avoid unnecessary surprises, and understand that fear may be a nervous system response rather than an attitude problem. A surgeon cannot change the patient’s history. But the surgical team can make the present feel less like a trap.

For example, consider a refugee who needs gallbladder surgery. The operation may be routine to the surgeon, but nothing about it feels routine to the patient. They may fear anesthesia because unconsciousness means loss of control. They may mistrust institutions because institutions previously harmed them. They may hesitate to describe symptoms because authority figures once punished honesty. A trauma-informed surgical visit does not require the surgeon to become a therapist. It requires the surgeon to remain fully human.

Medical Ethics Draws a Bright Line

The ethical boundary is clear: health professionals must not participate in torture. The reason is not merely public relations, although “Doctors: Now With Less Torture” would be a concerning slogan. The deeper reason is that medicine depends on trust. Patients allow clinicians intimate access to the body because they believe the clinician’s knowledge will be used for healing, not domination.

When medical knowledge is used to calibrate suffering, conceal harm, enable coercion, or keep a person alive only so abuse can continue, the profession betrays its own foundation. The same knowledge that helps an anesthesiologist prevent pain could, in the wrong moral universe, help someone manipulate suffering. That is exactly why ethics cannot be optional wallpaper in medicine. It must be load-bearing.

Surgery teaches this lesson every day. The operating room is full of controlled injury. Incisions are made. Tissue is moved. Blood is expected. But everything is organized around a therapeutic goal, consent, monitoring, sterility, pain control, and accountability. Remove those safeguards, and the moral meaning changes completely.

Surgical Culture Has Its Own Pain Problem

Patients are not the only people who can get used to suffering. Surgeons and surgical trainees can too. Medical culture has long admired stamina, precision under pressure, and emotional control. Those traits matter. Nobody wants a surgeon who collapses into existential poetry every time the pager beeps. But toughness can become toxic when it tells clinicians to ignore exhaustion, grief, fear, hunger, family life, or their own mental health.

The old surgical stereotype is the heroic operator who never sleeps, never doubts, and survives on black coffee, adrenaline, and the occasional vending-machine cracker. This image is great for television and terrible for actual human beings. A surgeon who is never allowed to admit pain may become less able to recognize it in others. A trainee who is shamed into silence may later confuse silence with professionalism.

Better surgical culture does not mean lowering standards. It means recognizing that excellence and humanity are not enemies. A rested, supported, ethically grounded surgeon is not weaker. That surgeon is safer. The operating room needs discipline, but it also needs humility. It needs hierarchy during crises, but it also needs psychological safety so a nurse, resident, or technician can speak up before a mistake reaches the patient.

The Patient’s Fear Is Part of the Procedure

One of the most useful things a surgical team can say is, “It makes sense that you are nervous.” That sentence costs nothing, requires no prior authorization, and has fewer side effects than most hospital pudding. It also tells the patient that fear is not a personal failure.

Before surgery, people worry about pain, anesthesia, waking up, not waking up, scars, complications, bills, time off work, childcare, and whether the surgeon has steady hands or merely confident eyebrows. Good preoperative communication does not eliminate every worry, but it gives worry a map. Patients should know what pain is expected, what pain is not normal, who to call, how medications should be used, and what recovery milestones matter.

When clinicians skip this step, patients may feel abandoned. When they explain clearly, patients often tolerate discomfort better because it is no longer mysterious. Pain with meaning, context, and a plan is different from pain that feels ignored.

Why Normalizing Pain Is Not the Same as Managing It

There is a big difference between telling a patient, “Some discomfort is expected, and here is how we will help you,” and telling them, “That’s just surgery, deal with it.” The first is honest. The second is lazy with a stethoscope.

Normalizing pain can be helpful when it reduces fear. A patient recovering from a knee replacement should understand that soreness during physical therapy does not mean the operation failed. A patient after abdominal surgery should know that coughing may hurt, but breathing exercises are important to prevent complications. Realistic expectations protect patients from panic.

But normalizing pain becomes harmful when it dismisses suffering. Severe, worsening, unusual, or uncontrolled pain deserves attention. So does pain accompanied by fever, shortness of breath, confusion, new weakness, or other concerning symptoms. The phrase “everyone hurts after surgery” should never be used as a locked door.

Examples From Everyday Surgery

Example 1: The Patient Who Apologizes for Pain

A patient after hernia repair rates pain as eight out of ten but quickly adds, “Sorry, I know you’re busy.” That apology tells a story. Maybe they have learned that pain annoys people. A good clinician hears both the number and the apology. The response should not be, “Be tougher.” It should be, “Thank you for telling me. Let’s figure out why it is that high and what we can safely do.”

Example 2: The Surgeon Who Has Seen It All

An experienced surgeon may have performed a procedure hundreds of times. For the patient, it is still the first time. Routine for the team is not routine for the person on the table. Professional maturity means remembering that repetition can dull the clinician’s emotional reaction, but it should not dull respect.

Example 3: The Trauma Survivor in Pre-op

A patient becomes visibly distressed when asked to remove clothing before a procedure. A rushed team might label them difficult. A trauma-informed team slows down, explains each step, offers a gown and privacy, asks whether a support person should be present, and gives choices where possible. The surgery may be the same. The experience is not.

Getting Used to Suffering Should Make Us More Responsible, Not Less

Repeated exposure to suffering is unavoidable in medicine. Emergency physicians, nurses, anesthesiologists, surgeons, therapists, and technicians see pain constantly. If every case shattered them, they could not function. Some emotional adaptation is necessary. The question is what kind.

Healthy adaptation says, “I can stay calm enough to help.” Harmful adaptation says, “This does not matter anymore.” Healthy adaptation builds skill, steadiness, and perspective. Harmful adaptation builds indifference. The difference may be invisible from the hallway, but patients feel it immediately.

The best clinicians are not the ones who feel nothing. They are the ones who feel enough to care and regulate enough to act. That balance is hard. It is also the job.

What Patients Can Do Before Surgery

Patients are not powerless in this process. Before surgery, they can ask practical questions: What pain level is typical after this operation? How long does the hardest part of recovery usually last? What medications will be used? Are there non-opioid options? What side effects should I watch for? When should I call the office or seek urgent care? Who will be involved in my procedure? What are the alternatives to surgery?

Patients should also share personal history that may affect care: chronic pain, previous bad reactions to anesthesia, medication use, substance use recovery, anxiety, trauma history, allergies, sleep apnea, or past experiences where pain was undertreated. This information is not gossip. It is clinical navigation data.

And yes, patients should write questions down. The human brain under stress has the storage capacity of a wet napkin. A written list is not annoying. It is smart.

What Clinicians Can Remember

Clinicians can remember that consent is not a form, pain is not a nuisance, and fear is not weakness. They can explain what they are doing before they do it. They can avoid using shame as a motivational tool. They can distinguish expected discomfort from uncontrolled pain. They can make room for cultural differences, language barriers, trauma histories, and distrust that may have very rational roots.

Most importantly, they can resist the occupational hazard of seeing the patient as “the gallbladder in room four” or “the appendix before lunch.” The patient is not a task. The patient is a person temporarily surrounded by tasks.

Experiences Related to Getting Used to Torture, and What Surgery Has to Do With It

One of the most revealing experiences in any surgical setting is watching how quickly the extraordinary becomes ordinary. On Monday, a new observer may stand in the operating room amazed that an entire team can gather around an unconscious patient, speak in calm voices, pass instruments, monitor numbers, adjust medications, and work inside the body with astonishing focus. By Friday, that same observer may already be learning where to stand, when to be quiet, and how not to contaminate anything. Growth is happening. So is desensitization.

That desensitization is not automatically bad. A surgical team cannot gasp dramatically at every incision. Nobody wants the scrub tech whispering, “Whoa,” like a teenager at a magic show. The patient needs calm professionals. The danger comes when calm becomes emotional distance so thick that the person disappears behind the procedure.

Patients have their own version of this experience. A person with repeated surgeries may become fluent in hospital routines: the fasting instructions, the IV start, the consent discussion, the cold room, the sticky monitors, the post-op questions. Familiarity can reduce fear. It can also create resignation. Some patients stop asking questions because they assume nothing will change. Others joke constantly because humor is the only hospital gown that actually fits.

There is also the experience of pain memory. A patient who once woke up from surgery with poorly controlled pain may approach the next operation with dread. Even if the new team is excellent, the body remembers. A trauma-informed clinician understands that reassurance must be specific. “You’ll be fine” is not enough. Better is: “Here is our pain plan. Here is what we will monitor. Here is what you can ask for. Here is who will help if the first plan is not enough.” Specificity gives fear something to hold onto besides imagination.

Another common experience is the awkward bravery patients perform for doctors. Many people underreport pain because they do not want to seem dramatic. They smile while gripping the bedrail. They say “I’m okay” in the same tone people use when standing in a kitchen full of smoke insisting dinner is “almost ready.” Surgery challenges that habit. Recovery requires honest reporting. Pain that is hidden cannot be managed. Nausea that is minimized may delay eating. Fear that is swallowed may return as panic at 2 a.m.

For clinicians, the parallel experience is learning to see pain without being consumed by it. A young doctor may initially feel every patient’s suffering like a personal emergency. Over time, they learn to breathe, assess, prioritize, and act. That is professional formation. But the clinician must also keep a small internal alarm activethe one that says, “Do not get too comfortable with another person’s distress.” That alarm is part of medical ethics.

The deepest lesson connecting torture and surgery is not that they are morally similar. They are not. The lesson is that the body is never merely an object. Touch can heal or harm. Restraint can protect or violate. Pain can be unavoidable or unnecessary. Expertise can liberate or dominate. Consent changes everything. Purpose changes everything. Compassion changes everything.

Getting used to suffering is sometimes how people survive. Refusing to become indifferent to suffering is how medicine remains worthy of trust.

Conclusion: The Scalpel Needs a Conscience

Surgery shows humanity at its most paradoxical. To heal, it may wound. To save life, it may risk life. To reduce future suffering, it may cause temporary pain. That paradox only works when ethics, consent, skill, and compassion hold the structure together.

Getting used to torture is a tragedy. Getting used to pain in a way that helps us treat it wisely is clinical maturity. The difference is moral attention. Patients deserve professionals who are calm but not cold, skilled but not arrogant, efficient but not dismissive. Clinicians deserve systems that do not grind empathy into dust and then call the dust professionalism.

In the end, the operating room is not just a place of anatomy. It is a test of values. The body on the table belongs to someone. The pain after surgery belongs to someone. The fear before anesthesia belongs to someone. And the responsibility to carereally carebelongs to everyone in the room.

Note: This article is for general educational and editorial purposes. It is not a substitute for medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment from a qualified healthcare professional.