Pain is often treatable but doctors, medical professionals, and patients don't understand the intricacies of chronic pain. Millions who suffer from pain become hopeless. With Aches and Gains, Dr. Paul Christo, a Johns Hopkins physician and leading pain specialist sheds new light on what it means to live with and overcome chronic pain. Dr. Christo shares celebrity interviews, including Naomi Judd, Lisa Swayze, Montel Williams, Ally Hilfiger, and Clay Walker, from his Sirius XM radio show Aches and Gains®, and stories from patients who have found a way to overcome the pain that once controlled their lives. Offering traditional, integrative, and innovative methods of easing pain, the book is a life-changing tool for anyone associated with pain including pain sufferers themselves, doctors, nurses, medical professionals, and caregivers. Features a foreword by renowned talk show host Montel Williams.
Chronic pain is a common medical problem shared by roughly 100 million Americans-close to one third of the U.S. population. In the past few decades there has been an alarming trend of using prescription opioids to treat chronic pain. But these opioids-the main prescribed analgesic-come with hidden costs, and this book reveals the ramifications of their use and provides a low or no-risk alternative. Armed with the right information, you can make informed decisions about your pain care. By appreciating the risks and limitations of prescription opioids, and by learning to reduce your own pain and suffering, you will gain control over your health and well-being. Each copy includes Beth Darnall's new binaural relaxation CD, Enhanced Pain Management.
Chronic pain costs the nation up to $635 billion each year in medical treatment and lost productivity. The 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act required the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to enlist the Institute of Medicine (IOM) in examining pain as a public health problem. In this report, the IOM offers a blueprint for action in transforming prevention, care, education, and research, with the goal of providing relief for people with pain in America. To reach the vast multitude of people with various types of pain, the nation must adopt a population-level prevention and management strategy. The IOM recommends that HHS develop a comprehensive plan with specific goals, actions, and timeframes. Better data are needed to help shape efforts, especially on the groups of people currently underdiagnosed and undertreated, and the IOM encourages federal and state agencies and private organizations to accelerate the collection of data on pain incidence, prevalence, and treatments. Because pain varies from patient to patient, healthcare providers should increasingly aim at tailoring pain care to each person's experience, and self-management of pain should be promoted. In addition, because there are major gaps in knowledge about pain across health care and society alike, the IOM recommends that federal agencies and other stakeholders redesign education programs to bridge these gaps. Pain is a major driver for visits to physicians, a major reason for taking medications, a major cause of disability, and a key factor in quality of life and productivity. Given the burden of pain in human lives, dollars, and social consequences, relieving pain should be a national priority.
In August, 1985, the 2nd International Conference on Illness Behaviour was held in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The first International Conference took place one year previous in Adelaide, South Australia, Australia. This book is based on the proceedings of the second conference. The purpose behind this conference was to facilitate the development of a single integrated model to account for illness experience and presentation. A major focus of the conference was to outline methodological issues related to current behaviour research. A multidiscipl~nary approach was emphasized because of the bias that collaborative efforts are likely to be the most successful in achieving greater understanding of illness behaviour. Significant advances in our knowledge are occurring in all areas of the biological and social sciences, albeit more slowly in the latter areas. Marked specialization in each of these areas has lead to greater difficulty in integrating new knowledge with that of other areas and the development of a meaningful cohesive model to which all can relate. Thus there is a major need for forums such as that provided by this conference.
Painâ€"it is the most common complaint presented to physicians. Yet pain is subjectiveâ€"it cannot be measured directly and is difficult to validate. Evaluating claims based on pain poses major problems for the Social Security Administration (SSA) and other disability insurers. This volume covers the epidemiology and physiology of pain; psychosocial contributions to pain and illness behavior; promising ways of assessing and measuring chronic pain and dysfunction; clinical aspects of prevention, diagnosis, treatment, and rehabilitation; and how the SSA's benefit structure and administrative procedures may affect pain complaints.
Includes a foreword by Major General David A. Rubenstein. From the editor: "71F, or "71 Foxtrot," is the AOC (area of concentration) code assigned by the U.S. Army to the specialty of Research Psychology. Qualifying as an Army research psychologist requires, first of all, a Ph.D. from a research (not clinical) intensive graduate psychology program. Due to their advanced education, research psychologists receive a direct commission as Army officers in the Medical Service Corps at the rank of captain. In terms of numbers, the 71F AOC is a small one, with only 25 to 30 officers serving in any given year. However, the 71F impact is much bigger than this small cadre suggests. Army research psychologists apply their extensive training and expertise in the science of psychology and social behavior toward understanding, preserving, and enhancing the health, well being, morale, and performance of Soldiers and military families. As is clear throughout the pages of this book, they do this in many ways and in many areas, but always with a scientific approach. This is the 71F advantage: applying the science of psychology to understand the human dimension, and developing programs, policies, and products to benefit the person in military operations. This book grew out of the April 2008 biennial conference of U.S. Army Research Psychologists, held in Bethesda, Maryland. This meeting was to be my last as Consultant to the Surgeon General for Research Psychology, and I thought it would be a good idea to publish proceedings, which had not been done before. As Consultant, I'd often wished for such a document to help explain to people what it is that Army Research Psychologists "do for a living." In addition to our core group of 71Fs, at the Bethesda 2008 meeting we had several brand-new members, and a number of distinguished retirees, the "grey-beards" of the 71F clan. Together with longtime 71F colleagues Ross Pastel and Mark Vaitkus, I also saw an unusual opportunity to capture some of the history of the Army Research Psychology specialty while providing a representative sample of current 71F research and activities. It seemed to us especially important to do this at a time when the operational demands on the Army and the total force were reaching unprecedented levels, with no sign of easing, and with the Army in turn relying more heavily on research psychology to inform its programs for protecting the health, well being, and performance of Soldiers and their families."
Why would anyone seek out the very experience the rest of us most wish to avoid? Why would religious worshipers flog or crucify themselves, sleep on spikes, hang suspended by their flesh, or walk for miles through scorching deserts with bare and bloodied feet? In this insightful new book, Ariel Glucklich argues that the experience of ritual pain, far from being a form of a madness or superstition, contains a hidden rationality and can bring about a profound transformation of the consciousness and identity of the spiritual seeker. Steering a course between purely cultural and purely biological explanations, Glucklich approaches sacred pain from the perspective of the practitioner to fully examine the psychological and spiritual effects of self-hurting. He discusses the scientific understanding of pain, drawing on research in fields such as neuropsychology and neurology. He also ranges over a broad spectrum of historical and cultural contexts, showing the many ways mystics, saints, pilgrims, mourners, shamans, Taoists, Muslims, Hindus, Native Americans, and indeed members of virtually every religion have used pain to achieve a greater identification with God. He examines how pain has served as a punishment for sin, a cure for disease, a weapon against the body and its desires, or a means by which the ego may be transcended and spiritual sickness healed. "When pain transgresses the limits," the Muslim mystic Mizra Asadullah Ghalib is quoted as saying, "it becomes medicine." Based on extensive research and written with both empathy and critical insight, Sacred Pain explores the uncharted inner terrain of self-hurting and reveals how meaningful suffering has been used to heal the human spirit.
From reviews of Deer, eds., Comprehensive Treatment of Chronic Pain by Medical, Interventional, and Integrative Approaches: "Comprehensive Treatment of Chronic Pain by Medical, Interventional, and Integrative Approaches is a major textbook... [I]t should be a part of all departmental libraries and in the reference collection of pain fellows and pain practitioners. In fact, this text could be to pain as Miller is to general anesthesia." Journal of Neurosurgical Anesthesiology Edited by master clinician-experts appointed by the American Academy of Pain Medicine, this is a soft cover version of the Interventional sections of the acclaimed Deer, eds., Comprehensive Treatment of Chronic Pain by Medical, Interventional, and Integrative Approaches. It is intended as a primary reference for busy clinicians who seek up-to-date and authoritative information about interventional approaches to treating chronic pain. State-of-the-art coverage of full range of techniques: neural blockades, neurolysis blocks, and neurostimulation Review of clinically relevant anatomy and physiology "Key Points" preview contents of each chapter
Set in Paris in the mid-1960s, Lucile, a young, rootless woman, finds herself torn between a fifty-year-old businessman and a thirty-year-old hot-blooded, impulsive editor; and, in a companion to the novel, the translator describes the process of rewritin
