Pain: The Science and Culture of Why We Hurt - Softcover

Jackson, Marni

3.7

76 ratings by Goodreads

9780679311904: Pain: The Science and Culture of Why We Hurt

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0679311904 ISBN 13: 9780679311904

Publisher: Vintage Canada, 2003

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A compulsively readable explorer’s journal of the hidden territory of pain, as profound and insightful as the work of Oliver Sacks and Sherwin Nuland.

A bee sting on the lips was the tiny lance that set Marni Jackson off on a four-year exploration of the many ways in which we suffer. Exiled for an afternoon in the country called pain, she realized that no one had the words to describe her condition although it was as familiar as a headache. A fusion of emotion, nerve and memory, pain inspired only questions.

“Why do we still distinguish between mental pain and physical pain,” she asks, “when pain is always an emotional experience? Why is pain so poorly understood, especially in a century of self-scrutiny? Hasn’t anyone noticed the embarrassing fact that science is about to clone a human being but still can’t cure the pain of a bad back?” North Americans spend $24 billion a year on pain relief while chronic pain is on the rise. If pain is the reason why most people visit the doctor, why are most doctors so bad at addressing the problem of suffering?

Pain: The Fifth Vital Sign dives back into the history of pain and forward into the possibilities of pain genetics, bringing us stories of both people in pain and the pain pioneers: eccentrics and artists, wrestlers and writers, ministers and mothers, psychologists and philosophers, nurses and doctors. Marni Jackson has created a definitive, heartfelt, funny and beguiling portrait of a condition we can’t live with -- and can’t live without.

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About the Author:

MARNI JACKSON is the author of The Mother Zone. She lives in Toronto.

From the Inside Flap:

ne experiences it, yet we have trouble talking about it and science has only recently begun to understand how it works. Pain: The Fifth Vital Sign is a groundbreaking inquiry into the nature, treatment, and definition of modern pain.

In the United States, there has been a recent campaign to treat pain as the fifth vital sign. Just as temperature, respiration, pulse, and blood pressure, the four traditional vital signs, must be charted, hospitals are now obliged to assess pain in their patients, too. If this indeed happens, it will be nothing less than groundbreaking―making pain far more visible.

But how has it come about that we spend $24 billion a year in North America on Tylenol, Advil, and the rest, and yet chronic pain is on the rise? Why is it that medicine can master intrauterine surgery but it can’t help people with bad backs or migraines? Pain is the number one reason why people go to the doctor’s office, and the number one reason they c

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