Pain as Human Experience: An Anthropological Perspective

The authors of this innovative selection of essays provide new insights into a prevalent and challenging subject: chronic pain. Pain causes endless suffering, alters lives, frustrates health care providers, and costs untold billions of dollars. Although pain is ubiquitous to the human experience, it remains enigmatic in terms of its diagnosis, pathophysiology, natural history, and treatment. Pain, particularly in its chronic forms, challenges the biomedical model, since it obscures the traditional border between mind and body, objective and subjective, real and unreal, physical and psychosocial. This book contains research on the experiences of chronic pain in the American sociocultural context. The researchers conducted long interviews among patients with various types of chronic pain and undertook participant observations at a residential pain clinic in New England. Their findings go beyond the old ethnic stereotypes of pain behavior (for instance, that Italians are more expressive and Yankees more withholding) to examine the