Living a Healthy Life with Chronic Pain: Getting Your Life Back

Now completely updated, this book is designed to help you manage your pain so that you can get on with living a satisfying, fulfilling life.
Chronic pain includes many types of conditions from a variety of causes. Despite these differences, all readers of this book have one very important thing in common — you are living with pain every day.
This book is designed to help you manage your pain so that you can get on with living a satisfying, fulfilling life.
To help you discover strategies and skills that will make a difference, this book emphasizes four concepts:
1. Each person with chronic pain is unique. There is no one treatment or approach that is right for everybody.
2. There are a number of things you can do to feel better. These things will not eliminate pain, but they will help you to better manage pain, and help you to become more active and more involved in life.
3. With knowledge and experimentation, you are the best judge of which self-management tools and techniques are best for you.
4. The responsibility for managing your chronic pain day-to-day rests with you, not anybody else. Many people can be of help to you — your family and friends, your health care team. But, in the end, the responsibility for self-management is yours.
Acknowledging that overcoming chronic pain is a daily challenge, this book provides you with the self-management tools to help you meet that challenge.
Includes a Moving Easy audio program, a set of easy-to-follow exercises that can be performed at home.

Sandra LeFort, MN, PhD is professor emerita at the Faculty of Nursing, Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada. Kate Lorig, DrPH, is professor emerita at Stanford University School of Medicine and a partner in the Self-Management Resource Center. Diana Laurent, MPH, is a health educator and partner in the Self-Management Resource Center. Virginia González, MPH, is a health educator and partner in the Self-Management Resource Center. David Sobel, MD, MPH, is adjunct lecturer in the Department of Medicine, Stanford University School of Medicine. Marian Minor, PT, PhD, is a professor emerita at the University of Missouri School of Health Professions where she taught and did research on exercise. Francis Keefe, PhD, is a Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Duke University Medical Center and Director of the Duke Pain Prevention and Treatment Research Program. Maureen Gecht-Silver, OTD, MPH, OTR/L, is an assistant professor of clinical family medicine and occupational therapy at University of Illinois at Chicago.