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

[vom-marlowe.livejournal.com]

Well, it's true that pain itself causes massive changes in the body, including causing chemical depression, etc.

What makes me wary about this book is the idea of thinking the pain away, which is not in fact new, but very old, and very punishment based. That's Dr Sarno all over and he makes flames shoot up the side of my face. (I have encountered him before.)

Part of the problem with his treatment approach and some other similar approaches, is that it leaves out the true psycho-social dynamics, emphasis on the social. That is to say, if you treat someone with chronic pain by telling them that it is all in their head, and that they need to think their way out of it, especially if they are female, they will seem to 'get better' but only because they are lying their ass off. And then they go see another doctor. I look at some of these dudes reports on 'curing' chronic pain and discovered that part of what they said was success was that patients weren't going back to them. Which....is not a sign of a cure. At all. There's so much shame around having pain at all that many people with it just lie anyway, and essentially don't get better, but suffer.

Anyway. It is true that pain changes the body, but...eh. There's lots there, reading between the lines, that makes me go hmmmmm.