Now on the wishlist...

[telophase]

Review of Melanie Thernstrom's The Pain Chronicles: Cures, Myths, Mysteries, Prayers, Diaries, Brain Scans, Healing, and the Science of Suffering. from the review: "She shows that medical treatment of pain is suboptimal because most doctors have not yet incorporated recent scientific discoveries into their thinking, discoveries indicating that chronic pain is a disease in its own right, a state of pathological pain sensitivity."

Essentially, if I'm reading this right, her argument is that a certain amount of chronic pain is caused by the pain itself: sometimes because the people who have it behave or carry themselves in maladaptive ways which cause muscles to be disused and new pain to occur, and sometimes because the pain itself or the treatment of the pain causes changes in the brain or body.

Comments

[buymeaclue.livejournal.com]

I think I have inserted my foot squarely into my mouth, and I apologize. Will attempt to educate myself more thoroughly going forward. (ETA: I didn't mean, fwiw, to suggest that live-with-it was necessarily a good solution or a solution at all, in general or in a particular case. I do know I don't know enough to make prescriptions! So if that's how it sounded, that was careless wording on my part.)

[vom-marlowe.livejournal.com]

It's OK. I really shouldn't be thinking or talking about this at all today, because I know better than to do it when I've been on a bad run of pain days. A lot of the chronic pain stuff that's bad (IMO) sounds reasonable at first read(and IS emminently reasonable if it's relegated to one's own intimate personal decisions, like, whatever works for herself is cool, but it's different if she's broadening that out), I think, but the way it plays out is ugly, and not always obvious unless you've done a lot of reading on the chronic pain/disability politics. Does that make sense? I don't know. I'm sorry I snapped.

[buymeaclue.livejournal.com]

No worries; that's totally fair, and I apologize again for the thoughtless comment!

[fmanalyst.livejournal.com]

Plus a lot of the pain politics turns into blaming the victim for being disabled. "If you only did this, this, and that, I</> wouldn't have to listen to you complain about how much pain you're in." And that's alongside, "You're overestimating your pain because you just want to get high."

I've been a pain sufferer for over 20 years now. I've had it up to here with the 'power of positive thinking' crowd.