Pain: The Fifth Vital Sign

Why is pain so poorly understood? Why do we still distinguish between mental pain and physical pain, when pain is always an emotional experience? How can it be that science is about to clone a human being but still can't cure the pain of a bad back? If pain is the reason why most people visit the doctor, why are most doctors so bad at addressing the problem of suffering? Marni Jackson's "Pain: The Fifth Vital Sign" is a witty, personal and groundbreaking inquiry into the nature, treatment and definition of human pain, one of the most misunderstood and elusive subjects to challenge humankind. In the questing and narrative manner of Oliver Sacks, Jackson takes us back into the history of pain and forward into the possibilities of pain genetics, Jackson brings us stories both of people in pain and the pain pioneers: eccentrics and artists, wrestlers and writers, psychologists and philosophers, nurses and doctors. Above all, "Pain" makes an elusive subject vivid and readable. We all know what pain is. Now Marni Jackson has given it a voice.

ne experiences it, yet we have trouble talking about it and science has only recently begun to understand how it works. Pain: The Fifth Vital Sign is a groundbreaking inquiry into the nature, treatment, and definition of modern pain.

In the United States, there has been a recent campaign to treat pain as the fifth vital sign. Just as temperature, respiration, pulse, and blood pressure, the four traditional vital signs, must be charted, hospitals are now obliged to assess pain in their patients, too. If this indeed happens, it will be nothing less than groundbreaking―making pain far more visible.

But how has it come about that we spend $24 billion a year in North America on Tylenol, Advil, and the rest, and yet chronic pain is on the rise? Why is it that medicine can master intrauterine surgery but it can’t help people with bad backs or migraines? Pain is the number one reason why people go to the doctor’s office, and the number one reason they c