The Pain Chronicles: Cures, Myths, Mysteries, Prayers, Diaries, Brain Scans, Healing, and the Science of Suffering
Melanie Thernstrom
Language: English
Pages: 384
ISBN: 0865476810
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Each of us will know physical pain in our lives, but none of us knows when it will come or how long it will stay. Today as much as 10 percent of the population of the United States suffers from chronic pain. It is more widespread, misdiagnosed, and undertreated than any major disease. While recent research has shown that pain produces pathological changes to the brain and spinal cord, many doctors and patients still labor under misguided cultural notions and outdated scientific dogmas that prevent proper treatment, to devastating effect.
In The Pain Chronicles, a singular and deeply humane work, Melanie Thernstrom traces conceptions of pain throughout the ages—from ancient Babylonian pain-banishing spells to modern brain imaging—to reveal the elusive, mysterious nature of pain itself. Interweaving first-person reflections on her own battle with chronic pain, incisive reportage from leading-edge pain clinics and medical research, and insights from a wide range of disciplines—science, history, religion, philosophy, anthropology, literature, and art—Thernstrom shows that when dealing with pain we are neither as advanced as we imagine nor as helpless as we may fear.
Both a personal meditation and an intellectual exploration, The Pain Chronicles illuminates and makes sense of the all-too-human experience of pain—and confronts with extraordinary grace and empathy its peculiar traits, its harrowing effects, and its various antidotes.
warning for something that is literally life-threatening. With chronic pain, every experience, every movement, every situation gets inappropriately stamped and experienced in the mind as life-threatening. We’re not supposed to be exposed to danger all the time, and we’re not supposed to be hearing an alarm bell all the time. You can see how pain has the potential to make someone go insane.” The devastation of chronic pain is the way in which, over time, it “spreads out and pollutes the brain.”
interoceptive cortex: See A. D. (Bud) Craig, “Interoception: the Sense of the Physiological Condition of the Body,” Current Opinion in Neurobiology 13 (2003): 500–505. ‘etsev: Help with the Hebrew etymology was provided by Sara Brumfield of UCLA. malevolent and beneficent demons and deities: See Walter Addison Jayne, The Healing Gods of Ancient Civilizations (New Hyde Park, N.Y.: University Books, 1962), 89–128. eyes, mouth, nostrils, and ears: Ibid., 104. trepanation: See Robert Arnott et
and their opposites” (emphasis added). Cited in David Konstan, The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks (University of Toronto Press, 2006), 33. “we may sometimes suffer”: René Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, volume 1, ed. John Cottingham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 361. “I had never been shot”: See Wall, Pain, 7. “Pain is whatever”: Margo McCaffery, Nursing Practice Theories Related to Cognition, Bodily Pain, and Man-Environment Interactions (Los Angeles: UCLA
misperceived as pain, chronic pain sufferers can also suffer from heightened sensitivity to painful stimuli, in a process known as hyperalgesia that involves an amplification of pain signals (in the periphery, or in the spinal cord, or in the brain itself). Hyperalgesia can endure long after its initial protective function has been served. Pain begets pain. The longer that pain pathways relay pain messages, the more efficient those pathways become, causing greater pain to be transmitted, the way
activity of all neurons. But by combining a derivative of lidocaine with capsaicin (the substance that makes chili peppers burn your mouth by binding to the pain receptors that detect burning), Dr. Woolf was able to target the lidocaine derivative into the pain neurons through the channel opened by capsaicin while leaving the other neurons unaffected. His work has been done on rodents, but he has licensed the idea to a pharmaceutical company that is preparing to begin human trials. Most of Dr.