Communicating Chronic Pain

This book brings into dialogue approaches from anthropology, sociology, visual art, theatre, and literature to question what kinds of relations, frames and politics constitute pain across disciplines and methodologies. Each chapter offers a unique window onto the notoriously difficult problem of how pain is defined and communicated. The contributors reimagine the value of images and photography, poetry, history, drama, stories and interviews, not as ‘better’ representations of the pain experience, but as devices to navigate the complexity of pain across different physical, social, and intersubjective domains. This innovative collection provides a new access point to the phenomenon of pain and the materialities, affects, structures and institutions that constitute it. This book will appeal to readers seeking to better understand pain’s complexity and the social and affective ecologies through which pain is known, communicated and lived.

This book shows how communicating better with patients about their pain can help clinicians create safer and more effective treatment strategies. This book offer clinicians a wealth of pratical guidance about asking the right questions and assessing patient responses.

Combining critical research with memoir, essay, poetry and creative biography, this insightful volume sensitively explores the lived experience of chronic pain. Confronting the language of pain and the paradox of writing about personal pain, Communicating Pain is a personal response to the avoidance, dismissal and isolation experienced by the author after developing intractable pelvic pain in 2003. The volume focuses on pain's infamous resistance to verbal expression, the sense of exile experienced by sufferers and the under-recognised distinction between acute and chronic pain. In doing so, it creates a platform upon which scholarly, imaginative and emotional quotients round out pain as the sum of physical actualities, mental challenges and psychosocial interactions. Additionally, this work creates a dialogue between medicine and literature. Considering the works of writers such as Harriet Martineau, Alphonse Daudet and Aleksander Wat, it enables a multi-genre narrative heightened by poetry, fictional storytelling and life-writing. Coupled with academic rigour, this insightful monograph constitutes a persuasive and unique exploration of pain and the communication of suffering. It will appeal to students and researchers interested in fields such as Medical Humanities, Autobiography Studies and Sociology of Health and Illness.

What is persistent pain? How do we communicate pain, not only in words but in visual images and gesture? How do we respond to the pain of another, and can we do it better? Can explaining how pain works help us handle it? This unique compilation of voices addresses these and bigger questions.Defined as having lasted over three months, persistent pain changes the brain and nervous system so pain no longer warns of danger: it seems to be a fault in the system. It is a major cause of disability globally, but it remains difficult to communicate, a problem both to those with pain and those who try to help. Language struggles to bridge the gap, and it raises ethical challenges in its management unlike those of other common conditions.Encountering Pain shares leading research into the potential value of visual images and non-verbal forms of communication as means of improving clinician-patient interaction. It is divided into four sections: hearing, seeing, speaking, and a final series of contributions on the future for persistent pain. The chapters are accompanied by vivid photographs co-created with those who live with pain.The volume integrates the voices of leading scientists, academics and contemporary artists with poetry and poignant personal testimonies to provide a manual for understanding the meanings of pain, for healthcare professionals, pain patients, students, academics and artists. The voices and experiences of those living with pain are central, providing tools for discussion and future research, shifting register between creative, academic and personal contributions from diverse cultures and weaving them together to offer new understanding, knowledge and hope.Praise for Encountering Pain 'From a remarkable variety of disciplinary and cultural perspectives - from medicine and therapy to the creative arts and philosophy - this inspirational and eye-opening collection succeeds in articulating the mysterious and overwhelmingly complex sensory experience that is pain. Pain, the encounters in this volume suggest, defies definition; it is subjective and unpredictable; it can be phantom or real. Through its radical and engaging use of testimonies, Encountering Pain never shies away from metaphor and the unfounded fear, that the allegorising of pain will dilute its reality. Examined through a multitude of verbal and non-verbal paradigms, contributors discuss the physicality of pain and its political, administrative and medical regulation; the body's trauma and expressiveness; how pain is transmuted into art. The communication of something that resists being expressed straightforwardly in verbal form metamorphoses, as you read this extraordinarily rich and innovative volume, into a metaphor for life itself, for who we are, how we become social beings by developing empathy and respect for the pain of others, for how we develop and then question through these interactions our sense of identity.' - Professor Stella Bruzzi, Dean, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, UCL'This book is the result of a collaborative, multi-disciplinary investigation into the experience of pain and how it might be understood and ameliorated. Deborah Padfield's photographs, made in collaboration with pain sufferers, reveal how an otherwise debilitating, highly subjective and individualising experience might become a topic for intersubjective communication. Through her innovative and experimental photography we learn that the photographic image can potentially play a role in the medical field by addressing 'what is felt' by the patient alongside the usual indexical medical documentation of 'what is there'. In so doing photography may provide a means of sharing perceptual experience and stimulating doctor-patient discussion around the emotional interplay of body and mind. - Gina Glover, a photographic artist working in the fields of health, genetics and science.www.ginaglover.com'This is a majestic volume. Visually striking, intellectually challenging, and experientially transformative, this book promises to change how everyone encounters pain.' - Dr Rob Boddice, Freie Universität Berlin'Deborah Padfield's book, Perceptions of Pain (2003), introduced a ground-breaking strategy through which photography became an effective tool to interpret pain - an aspect of human experience that can, so often, appear inexplicable. The powerful images in this book are further evidence of the collaborative strength of photography and its special ability to give voice to those who are excluded.' - Dewi Lewis, Publisher'A work that brings photographic, figurative and poetic images of chronic pain to the clinic and demonstrates how visual, communicative frameworks can re-voice experiences and diagnoses of pain. This major, deeply reflective collection of papers represents a turning-point in defining the multifaceted importance of painscapes in clinical, therapeutic, and humanistic advocacy work. It firmly situates the arts and humanities, alongside the sciences, in responding to the pressing need for new strategies to alleviate chronic pain.' - Prof Brian Hurwitz, Emeritus Professor of Medicine and the Arts, King's College London'Pain and its ever-increasing numbers of sufferers inhabit a kind of night world isolated from the "normal" day world. 'A bandage hides the place where each is living', W.H. Auden once wrote, while we, the healthy, 'stand elsewhere'. Encountering Pain is an attempt to narrow this rift by making sure sufferers are heard, seen, and able to speak again - so that they might be better understood. Padfield and Zakrzewska have assembled an impressive team of patients, healthcare providers, artists and academicians, all determined to make pain more visible and communicable. The authors compellingly demonstrate that language -- whether in the form of words, gestures or images - is a necessary first step towards alleviating pain. That it can often be as powerful as medicine. '- Dr David Biro, Associate Clinical Professor of Dermatology at SUNY Health Science Center @ Brooklyn and author of The Language of Pain: Finding Words, Compassion, and Relief.

What is persistent pain? How do we communicate pain, not only in words but in visual images and gesture? How do we respond to the pain of another, and can we do it better? Can explaining how pain works help us handle it? This unique compilation of voices addresses these and bigger questions. Defined as having lasted over three months, persistent pain changes the brain and nervous system so pain no longer warns of danger: it seems to be a fault in the system. It is a major cause of disability globally, but it remains difficult to communicate, a problem both to those with pain and those who try to help. Language struggles to bridge the gap, and it raises ethical challenges in its management unlike those of other common conditions. Encountering Pain shares leading research into the potential value of visual images and non-verbal forms of communication as means of improving clinician–patient interaction. It is divided into four sections: hearing, seeing, speaking, and a final series of contributions on the future for persistent pain. The chapters are accompanied by vivid photographs co-created with those who live with pain. The volume integrates the voices of leading scientists, academics and contemporary artists with poetry and poignant personal testimonies to provide a manual for understanding the meanings of pain, for healthcare professionals, pain patients, students, academics and artists. The voices and experiences of those living with pain are central, providing tools for discussion and future research, shifting register between creative, academic and personal contributions from diverse cultures and weaving them together to offer new understanding, knowledge and hope.

Volumes of the Topical Issues in Pain series are now a common sight in Physiotherapy departments and practices throughout the UK. More and more students are using them to learn clinical skills and as key references for study and research. The accolades the series has received from within and outside the profession are both moving and cheering for Physiotherapy. This 5th volume energetically moves the boundaries of Physiotherapy on, divided into 5 sections, it considers some of the most important issues and challenges facing clinicians and society today. The section on return to work (3) examines the financial and human costs of work absence, the difficulties that surround and often prevent people in pain from returning to work and finally details practical ways of helping patients actually get there. It is becoming increasingly clear that the traditional treatments being offered for common and benign pain states, whether by therapists, Drs or Surgeons, are ineffective when measured in terms of return to work and confident function - why is this? The answers most likely lie in the broader, multidimensional, understanding of pain biology (section 5) that is embraced in the principles and practice of cognitive-behavioural therapies and approaches (section 4), especially when they are used alongside physical rehabilitation programmes (sections 1, 2, 3 & 4). Vitally, these proven approaches are patient-orientated requiring highly trained experts in listening, explaining and communicating (sections 1 & 2). This book acknowledges that there no simple ‘fix’ that takes a hurting human being from a state of vulnerability back to one of physical confidence and full working potential. What it is does though, is breathe a breath of optimism into the current state-of-the-art of the physical pain-management process that, when skilfully applied, actually does help a great deal. The Topical Issues in Pain series derives from the work, study days and seminars of the Physiotherapy Pain Association and is written by clinicians for clinicians.

While there is widespread recognition among experts that biological, psychological, and social factors influence the experience of pain, for reasons unclear the social component has failed to attract much attention. Recognizing the larger social reality in the background of each patient, this book fills a major gap in the literature by incorporating the social dimension - most significantly, the family - in the overall assessment and treatment of pain.