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Author Warraich, Haider, author.

Title The song of our scars : the untold story of pain / Haider Warraich.

Publication Info. New York : Basic Books, 2022.

Copies

Location Call No. Status
 Enfield, Main Library - Adult Department  616.0472 WAR    Check Shelf
 Glastonbury, Welles-Turner Memorial Library - Adult Department  616.0472 WARRAICH    Check Shelf
 Newington, Lucy Robbins Welles Library - Adult Department  616.0472 WARRAICH    Check Shelf
 Plainville Public Library - Non Fiction  616.0472 WAR    Check Shelf
 Portland Public Library - Adult Department  616.0472 WAR    Check Shelf
 Simsbury Public Library - Non Fiction  616.0472 WARRAICH    Check Shelf
 West Hartford, Noah Webster Library - Non Fiction  616.0472 WARRAICH    Check Shelf
 Windsor, Main Library - Adult Department  616.0472 WA    Check Shelf
Edition First edition.
Description vii, 307 pages ; 25 cm
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 259-292) and index.
Contents The interpretation of agony : what we talk about when we talk about pain -- How we hurt : the biology of acute pain -- No end in sight : how chronic pain erases a person -- Rage inside the machine : the fundamental nature of chronic pain -- The god of dreams : the history of opium and the cultural transformation of pain -- Angel of mercy : how we learned to stop worrying and love the pill -- Crown of thorns : the hijacking of modern medicine -- The pain of the powerless : injustice and the arc of suffering -- All in the head : the future of the body in pain.
Summary "One evening, while completing his medical training in Pakistan, Haider Warraich went to the hospital gym to work out. He was in the middle of a set when he heard the sound of a loud click in his back. His body went limp, the weight held above his chest came crashing down, and Haider was rushed into the hospital, now suddenly a patient where just a few hours earlier he had been a doctor. A decade later, Warraich is now an internist in Boston, and pain is a way of life. As he treats the suffering of his patients, he battles with his own chronic, occasionally debilitating pain. Neither he nor his colleagues have been able to understand its source, and he has come dangerously close to an opioid addiction trying to manage it. Eventually, Haider began to wonder whether the problem was the pain, or the way it is treated. In The Song of Our Scars, Haider Warraich offers a history of pain, both as a personal experience and as a medical ailment. We have only recently begun to treat pain as a purely physical sensation, and while the goal was to be able to offer safer, more reliable treatments, Warraich finds that it has actually had the opposite effect. Modern attitudes about pain paved the way for the opioid epidemic and made an already biased system of healthcare more racist, sexist, and classist: Your pain is more likely to be minimized or dismissed if you are a woman or a person of color, for example, and while the rich are offered ample assistance in managing opioid prescriptions, the poor are often left to fend for themselves. The medical community's attitudes toward pain have inspired us to make arbitrary and ill-supported distinctions between the 'real' pain of the body and the 'fake' pain that's in your head. And they have blinded us to the possibility that sometimes learning to live with your pain is better than trying to eliminate it. In the end, Warraich considers the possibility that pain, particularly chronic pain, is sometimes more usefully treated as an emotion than a sensation. A deeply felt investigation from a rising talent, The Song of Our Scars is both a trenchant indictment of a system gone astray and an empathic plea for a more holistic understanding of the human body."-- Provided by publisher.
Subject Warraich, Haider -- Health.
Pain -- History.
Pain -- Treatment.
Pain -- Social aspects.
Chronic pain -- Physiological aspects.
Chronic pain -- Psychological aspects.
Chronic pain -- Patients -- United States -- Biography.
MEDICAL / Pathology.
Chronic pain -- Patients. (OCoLC)fst00860121
Chronic pain -- Psychological aspects. (OCoLC)fst00860122
Health. (OCoLC)fst00952743
Pain. (OCoLC)fst01050382
Pain -- Social aspects. (OCoLC)fst01050410
Pain -- Treatment. (OCoLC)fst01050415
United States. (OCoLC)fst01204155
Genre/Form Biographies. (OCoLC)fst01919896
Autobiographies.
History. (OCoLC)fst01411628
ISBN 9781541675308 (hardcover)
1541675304 (hardcover)
9781541675292 (ebook)
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