Francisco Kaiut on pain

Translated from Ted Talk: Brazil

Who here has never had pain? Raise your hand.

Go ahead, raise it. Exactly. Everyone has pain. When I was six years old, I was shot in the hip. The bullet entered through my groin, hit the head of my femur, and exited through the back side.

Since then, since I was six years old, I have lived with pain. This pain has been with me since before I even had the cognitive ability to explain it to the adults responsible for me.

It marked my life. Hospitals, surgery, I don’t even remember everything. In fact, the pain erased much of my memory. I never played soccer; it took away my motor coordination.

Every trauma has a very interesting nature. Behind trauma, there is something that wants us to keep living. And sometimes, in order for us to survive, it erases parts of what happened so we can move forward. And with me, it was no different. It erased many things, deprived me of many experiences, but it also brought me here today.

So can I talk to you about pain? Because I have never been without it. And pain, as you just noticed, exists in all of us. More than that, it needs to be welcomed.

Pain may be one of the most fascinating phenomena in nature. It does not want to be silenced. It cannot be silenced. It needs to be welcomed, and it needs to be listened to.

Look at this number: 1.5 billion people worldwide live with pain. And I’m not talking about every kind of pain. I’m talking about joint pain: spine, hips, knees, ankles, shoulders, and neck.

Every time you sit at a dinner table, one out of every five people there is living with pain. So what we really have is a silent pandemic. A pandemic of pathological rigidity.

Every kind of rigidity carries a component of illness. No one is born rigid. We are all born children. We are all born completely flexible. But life makes us rigid. Life freezes us, and life brings pain.

Pain that comes from our history. Pain that comes from our education. Pain that comes from prejudice.

Thirty-three million Brazilians live with severe spinal pain every day.

That’s not a small number.

If we add spine, hips, shoulders, and knees together, we are talking about half of the world’s population living with pain. Among the elderly, especially those living in institutions, 84% have disabling pain. Our parents, grandparents, teachers, and almost everyone lives with some limitation because of pain.

So, what do we do?

Seventy-four percent of people who take medication conclude that the medication didn’t really solve the problem.

In fact, I need to tell you something: no pain medication truly solves pain. Every medication is a palliative. It masks the symptom. And worse, it prevents us from feeling. Medication arrives at the moment when your body is saying, “Please look at me. I need attention. I need care.” And the medication says, “Be quiet. You don’t have the right to communicate.” That’s what it does.

Pain may be one of the most misunderstood phenomena in human nature. It has value. It has a function. It wants us to look inward.

When we self-medicate, we silence our own brain and create neuroplastic confusion. And we do this so much that in the last six years opioid use has grown by more than 460%.

After medication, we often think: “Well, if nothing works … there’s always surgery. There’s always a new technology.” But spinal surgery has a 27% failure rate in the first year.

Surgery means risk. It means money. It means trauma. And 27% of people end up worse than before, because they experienced another trauma. When we talk about knee and hip surgeries, 40% of hips don’t improve within the first six months, and 53% of knees don’t improve.

We imagine surgery will take us back in time, that the pain will disappear, and the problem will never have existed. But it doesn’t work like that.

So today, my invitation to you is to change your perspective. Don’t rush to medication. Don’t rush to surgery just to eliminate pain.

Stop. Listen to your body. Feel your pain.

Millions of years of evolution created the refined pain system we have today. When we refuse to feel it, we ignore one of nature’s most brilliant creations.

There are better solutions.

Medication and surgery often work like this: we turn off the alarm without understanding the fire.

What actually helps? Meditation. Acupuncture. Education about the nature of pain.

When you understand pain, you understand your own process. And when we talk about complementary therapies, including yoga, we’re talking about nearly 70% improvement, even in complex pain conditions.

I’m not talking about simple pain. I’m talking about osteoarthritis, joint degeneration, and ligament injuries. Serious pain.

But when students arrive to practice with me, they’ve usually already tried everything. They’ve had surgery. They’ve had injections. They’ve taken medication.

So they don’t come to yoga as a first option. They come in desperation. They arrive without hope, instead of arriving with it.

Yet simple 16-week yoga protocols can improve pain by up to 67%, while also improving sleep, mobility, and overall quality of life. This is for people of all ages.

Think about that: 16 weeks. No drugs. All ages. All joints.

My work is not about stretching people. It’s not about twisting people into shapes.

My work is about giving people back the movement they lost.

But for that, you must listen to yourself. You must welcome your pain. Hold it gently, and move proactively toward your own health.

So stop drugging yourselves. Welcome yourselves. Listen to yourselves.

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