Pain is examined in this book from five equally intriguing and relevant perspectives: as metaphor, history, disease, narrative, and perception. 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. Furthermore, chronic pain is a world foreign to those who do not live in it. Pain dominates, it commands, it dictates. As this book so effectively explains, it is fundamentally and profoundly different, the product of unique biology and perception. Chronic pain is not simply a temporal extension of our everyday experience of acute pain. At first enigmatic, then entrapping, ultimately terrifying: Dolor dictat. The woven tapestry reveals, informs, and captivates in a way that the individual scattered threads do not. 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. In The Pain Chronicles, Melanie Thernstrom echoes Lewis Carroll by creatively, entertainingly, and provocatively uniting a collection of facts, questions, and musings into an extraordinarily accomplished opus. “The time has come,” the Walrus said, “To talk of many things: Of shoes - and ships - and sealing-wax - Of cabbages - and kings - And why the sea is boiling hot - And whether pigs have wings.” ( 1)
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |