The Song of Our Scars: The Untold Story of Pain, by Haider Warraich, MD
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In this issue of Healio Rheumatology, we have touched upon a topic that is incredibly important not only for our field of rheumatology, but for health care in general — namely, the issue of chronic pain and all its dimensions.
Accordingly, I want to draw our readership’s attention to an interesting and informative book that I have been recommending to certain patients, as well as to all of my colleagues who want to expand their knowledge of pain. The Song of Our Scars: The Untold Story of Pain, by Haider Warraich, MD, is an exploration of pain from multiple perspectives, including its neurobiology, the history and tragedy of the opioid crisis, the very meaning of chronic pain and suffering, and our challenges in dealing with chronic pain, from both the healer’s and the patient’s perspectives.
Image: Haider J. Warraich, MD
Warraich is erudite and capable of lucidly explaining the rapid advances underlying the physiology and pathology of chronic pain, which is even more impressive as his day job is one of an academic cardiologist. Even more impressive, however, are his humanistic narratives on pain and suffering, fed by his personal experience of suffering from a chronic and severely painful condition following an injury in medical school.
In the closing sections, he takes on the journey familiar to all rheumatologists, namely that of hearing the fears and frustrations of our patients who live with chronic pain. Although we have been successful at controlling pain from active inflammatory musculoskeletal diseases with our targeted therapies, we have made relatively little progress in managing the frequent concurrence of other overlapping pain conditions, including fibromyalgia, which have no easy answers.
Although Warraich offers no quick fixes for such disorders, he clearly and critically appraises the data on what does not work (ie, chronic opioids), and elegantly discusses the inextricable mind-body axis that belies the state of suffering and the power of empathy in the healing process. He is at his best, in my opinion, when he speaks both as a healer and patient because, in the end, as I like to say, all illness is personal.
I strongly recommend The Song of Our Scars: The Untold Story of Pain to all who want to understand pain in all its dimensions and would love to hear your take after reading it.
- For more information:
- Leonard H. Calabrese, DO, is the Chief Medical Editor, Healio Rheumatology, and Professor of Medicine, Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine of Case Western Reserve University, and RJ Fasenmyer Chair of Clinical Immunology at the Cleveland Clinic.
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