Pain, Suffering, and Healing (P23)

Suffering, Hope, and Healing

The words “pain” and “suffering” are so often used together in clinical practice they sometimes seem to merge into a single concept, with clinicians simply referring to “pain-and-suffering.” Writing in the early 1980s, Eric Cassell bemoaned the fact that the medical literature contained very few studies that specifi cally addressed suffering, although there were hundreds of reports that focused...

Promoting Healing and Reducing Suffering

Pain and suffering

brings added value to the study of pain and suffering? For teachers like me who are planning to co-teach a course on religion and medicine, in my case to students from Harvard Medical School and from Harvard Divinity School, this collection is a step forward, but it would have been more helpful if it had set up an ongoing dialogue between its two parts, forcing scholars who are comfortable anal...

Conceptualizing suffering and pain

BACKGROUND This article aims to contribute to a better conceptualization of pain and suffering by providing non-essential and non-naturalistic definitions of both phenomena. Contributions of classical evidence-based medicine, the humanistic turn in medicine, as well as the phenomenology and narrative theories of suffering and pain, together with certain conceptions of the person beyond them (th...

Pain, avoidance, and suffering

In this issue of PAIN, Drs. Vlaeyen and Linton [2] present a cogent review of research regarding the fear-avoidance model of chronic musculoskeletal pain, a model that Dr. Vlaeyen has pioneered. The model was developed in order to explain how persistent fear-based avoidance behavior could produce much of the suffering and disability associated with pain states. They highlight the key role of fe...