Pain As Human Experience : An Anthropological Perspective

Chronic pain alters every aspect of life. Sufferers often become frustrated and distrust a medical profession seemingly unable to explain or effectively treat their illness. There is no single diagnosis, no "natural course" of disease even for patients with the very same pathology, and no one therapeutic approach that either explains of encompasses each individual's pain. Chronic pain challenges the central tenet of biomedicine--that objective knowledge of the human body and mind is possible apart from subjective experience and social context.
The authors of this innovative collection offer an entirely different, ethnographic approach, searching out more effective ways to describe and analyze the human context of pain. How can we analyze a mode of experience that appears to the pain sufferer as an unmediated fact of the body and is yet so resistant to language? What is the relation between narrative and experience--between the stories told by pain sufferers and professionals and the felt experience of social life reflected and reworked by those accounts?
With case studies drawn from anthropological investigations of chronic pain sufferers and pain clinics in the northeastern United States, the authors attempt to invent new ways of writing about this language-resistant human experience. Focused on substantive issues in the study of chronic pain, their work explores the great divide between the culturally shaped language of suffering and the traditional language of medical and psychological theorizing. They argue that the representation of experience in local social worlds is a central challenge to the human sciences and to ethnographic writing, and that meeting that challenge is also crucial to the refiguring of pain in medical discourse and health policy debates. Anthropologists, scholars from the medical social sciences and humanities, and many general readers will be interested in Pain as Human Experience. In addition, behavioral medicine and pain specialists, psychiatrists, and primary care practitioners will find much that is relevant to their work in this book.

Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good is Associate Professor of Medical Sociology at Harvard Medical School. Paul E. Brodwin is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Byron J. Good is Professor of Medical Anthropology at Harvard Medical School. Arthur Kleinman is Professor of Medical Anthropology and Psychiatry at Harvard University.