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...

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...

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...

In considering pain and suffering, some considerations will appear about epistemological beliefs shaping the clinical practices of health-care workers. With this, we try to understand the usual omission of human suffering in the training of many health professionals. So, we emphasize the role of the pathogenic paradigm in how human suffering is viewed in health care. In contrast to those who se...

This paper argues that it is possible for suffering to occur in the absence of phenomenal consciousness − in the absence of a certain sort of experiential subjectivity, that is. (‘Phenomenal’ consciousness is the property that some mental states possess, when it is like something to undergo them, or when they have subjective feels, or possess qualia.) So even if theories of phenomenal conscious...

September-October 1998 Suffering is one of the most profound and disturbing of human experiences. The very word suffering has a resonance that relates to our sense of life’s meaning and the threat suffering poses to our hopes of happiness. It does not refer just to maladies, pains, and difficulties with which we can and should cope. It involves crises and threats that constitute a degradation o...

OBJECTIVE People living with sickle cell disease (SCD) experience severe episodic and chronic pain and frequently report poor interpersonal treatment within health-care settings. In this particularly relevant context, we examined the relationship between perceived discrimination and both clinical and laboratory pain. METHODS Seventy-one individuals with SCD provided self-reports of experience...

The alleviation of suffering is crucial in all of medicine, especially in the care of the dying. Suffering cannot be treated unless it is recognized and diagnosed. Suffering involves some symptom or process that threatens the patient because of fear, the meaning of the symptom, and concerns about the future. The meanings and the fear are personal and individual, so that even if two patients hav...