Hidden Dimensions of Suffering Using a Theoretical Framework of Supersymmetry to Model Structural Determinants of Chronic Pain in Black Men

Abstract

Chronic pain in Black men remains poorly explained by biomedical models that treat tissue pathology as the primary driver of symptom severity and treatment outcome. Decades of clinical evidence document that Black men are underassessed for pain, undertreated with analgesics, disproportionately suspected of drug seeking, concentrated in occupations that accelerate joint degeneration, and served by a health workforce with limited racial concordance. These forces do not act as isolated variables added onto a biomedical baseline. They behave as interacting fields that shift the observable clinical picture in ways a single tissue-based diagnosis cannot capture. This paper proposes a theoretical framework, inspired by the mathematics of supersymmetry and the hidden sector concept associated with the work of theoretical physicist Sylvester James Gates, in which chronic pain in Black men is understood as the visible projection of a higher dimensional structure of social and structural forces. We describe this model explicitly as a conceptual and heuristic analogy rather than a quantitative or predictive equation, and we ground each element of the framework in established epidemiological and clinical literature on pain disparities. Implications for clinical training, pain assessment protocols, and future interdisciplinary research are discussed.

Keywords: Chronic Pain; Black Men; Health Disparities; Social Determinants of Health; Theoretical Modeling

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