By Melanie Thernstrom (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
We all experience pain, some mild, some excruciating, and for some individuals, chronic, maddening pain.
After a swim one summer’s day, Melanie Thernstrom felt a severe neck pain that wouldn’t leave her.
Diagnosed with spinal stenosis and arthritis, she joined the estimated 116 million Americans who suffer from regular if often misdiagnosed pain. Thernstrom was lucky because her pain was attended to early on. In fact, early treatment is vital because constant pain often confuses friends, family, and doctors who may end up thinking the complainer is a hypochondriac.
What Thernstrom’s brilliant book does is investigate pain in a humane and perceptive manner. This is not a ‘how-to’ book, but rather it scrutinizes pain and how it affects sufferers.
“What, finally, is pain?” she asks, and answers, “Pain is an experience one is never in doubt about having. One might pause to wonder, Am I in love? But never, Am I in pain.”
She quotes a specialist in pain management nursing, saying, “Pain is whatever the experiencing person says it is, existing whenever the person says it does.”
Cures abound and her book is about pain’s “peculiar taste, its mysterious effects—and its antidotes.”
