The pain chronicles Cures, myths, mysteries, prayers, diaries, brain scans, healing, and the science of suffering

摘要

In The Pain Chronicles, Melanie Thern-strom echoes Lewis Carroll by creatively, entertainingly, and provocatively uniting a collection of facts, questions, and musings into an extraordinarily accomplished opus. This book, like chronic pain itself, is a tapestry woven from threads of biology, individual experiences of sensation and perception, genetics, psychology, belief systems, and the healing arts and their practitioners. The woven tapestry reveals, informs, and captivates in a way that the individual scattered threads do not.Two words sit alone on the first page. At first enigmatic, then entrapping, ultimately terrifying: Dolor dictat. Chronic pain is not simply a temporal extension of our everyday experience of acute pain. As this book so effectively explains, it is fundamentally and profoundly different, the product of unique biology and perception. Pain dominates, it commands, it dictates. Furthermore, chronic pain is a world foreign to those who do not live in it. Luckily, in this work we have Melanie Thernstrom - our Alice - to clearly and insightfully describe the view through her looking glass and what she found there.