It's like I literally expressed that? Maybe I made it trickier to parse by referring primarily to chronic pain--if you want to lump extreme, trauma-induced pain into that? Sure. When lives are on the line, whatever, do what needs to be done; we have doctors to make educated decisions based on the information available.

But I will contend most Americans--and my observations are largely limited to us--mostly harm themselves in the effort to avoid what we have largely decided is pain and is in many ways merely discomfort. And I tend to think that that ramps up into greater problems along the way.

I haven't seen any close friends or family just pop a Tylenol for every day aches and pains, but it certainly seems to be a thing, so I'm open to the idea that I'm living in some kind of bubble in that regard. I've always thought of pain medication as for bringing severe pain down to a lower (but non-zero) level, so for example it might not be taken at all if you break a toe, but would be more than reasonable for the jaw surgery in the first post in the thread.

It's interesting, chronic back pain is one of the most common chronic pain causes, and a doctor was talking to me recently about it (in general, luckily I don't have it). Apparently once it gets started it can have its own self reinforcing process, and there are measurable biological changes to how nerves fire etc. that are independent of any initial underlying injury. Probably there's some people faking or overstating it, but I could easily imagine such a process getting pretty severe. Unfortunately, the outlook is pretty bad I think once you've had it for a set amount of time.

So concerning chronic pain / opioid use I can't figure out if Americans are less willing to deal with pain, or actually have more pain, or some combination of both. If back pain just needs an initial injury to set it off, then escalates from there, the unhealthy lifestyles and ever increasing obesity levels here would do a lot to explain why it is becoming an increasing problem.