The Pain Chronicles (40 page)

“With her exalted spiritualism”
: John Gideon Millingen,
The Passions; or Mind and Matter
(London: J. & D. A. Darling, 1848), 157.

“exceedingly painful”
: Pernick,
A Calculus of Suffering
, 153.

variations of which are found in classical India
: See Antti Aarne,
The Types of the Folktale
, trans. Stith Thompson (Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1964), 240.

1835 Andersen version of “The Princess and the Pea”
: See Hans Christian Andersen, “The Princess and the Pea,” in
The Annotated Classic Fairy Tales
, ed. Maria Tatar (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), 284–87.

well-known study of housewives in the late 1960s
: R. A. Sternbach, “Ethnic Differences Among Housewives in Psychophysical and Skin Potential Response to Electric Shock,”
Psychophysiology
1 (1965): 241–46.

tolerance markedly increased for Jewish subjects
: See E. Poser, “Some Psychosocial Determinants of Pain Tolerance.” Read at the sixteenth International Congress of Psychology, Washington, D.C., 1963.

hold their hands in painfully icy water
: Richard Stephens et al., “Swearing as a Response to Pain,”
NeuroReport
20 (August 5, 2009): 1056–60.

benchmark 1972 Stanford University study
: Kenneth M. Woodrow et al., “Pain Tolerance: Differences According to Age, Sex and Race,”
Psychosomatic Medicine
34 (1972): 548–56.

blacks showed more tolerance than Asian Americans
: The Asian group mixed subjects of Japanese and Chinese descent.

women are more responsive to kappa-receptor drugs
: See H. L. Fields et al., “Brainstem Pain Modulating Circuitry Is Sexually Dimorphic with Respect to Mu and Kappa Opioid Receptor Function,”
Pain
85 (2000): 153–59, and Jon D. Levine et al., “Kappa-Opioids Produce Significantly Greater Analgesia in Women Than in Men,”
Nature Medicine
2 (1996): 1248–50.

drug had opposite effects on the two sexes
: See J. D. Levine et al., “The Kappa Opioid Nalbuphine Produces Gender- and Dose-Dependent Analgesia and Antianalgesia in Patients with Postoperative Pain,”
Pain
83 (1999): 339–45.

MC1R
: See J. S. Mogil et al., “The Melanocortin-1 Receptor Gene Mediates Female-Specific Mechanisms of Analgesia in Mice and Humans,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
100 (April 15, 2003): 4867–72.

2003 study . . . of postsurgical pain following
: M. Soledad Cepeda and Daniel B. Carr, “Women Experience More Pain and Require More Morphine Than Men to Achieve a Similar Degree of Analgesia,”
Anesthesia & Analgesia
97 (2003): 1464–68.

men receive more analgesic benefit
: See, for example, J. S. Walker, “Experimental Pain in Healthy Human Subjects: Gender Differences in Nociception and in Response to Ibuprofen,”
Anesthesia & Analgesia
86 (1998): 1257–62.

20 percent more general anesthesia
: See E. B. Liem et al., “Anesthetic Requirement is Increased in Redheads,”
Anesthesiology
101 (August 2004): 279–83.

2006 Ohio State University study
: See Lee Bowman, “Obese People More Sensitive to Pain, Study Finds,” Scripps Howard News Service, March 1, 2006.

little or inadequate anesthesia
: See Philip M. Boffey, “Infants’ Sense of Pain Is Recognized, Finally,”
New York Times
, November 24, 1987, and Helen Harrison, “Why Infant Surgery Without Anesthesia Went Unchallenged,”
New York Times
, December 17, 1987.

editorial in
The New England Journal of Medicine: See A. B. Fletcher, “Pain in the Neonate,”
New England Journal of Medicine
317 (November 19, 1987).

study led by Dr. Robert R. Edwards
: Robert R. Edwards, “Individual Differences in Endogenous Pain Modulation as a Risk Factor for Chronic Pain,”
Neurology
65 (2005): 437–43.

subgroup of African Americans
: See M. McNeilly, “Neuropeptide and Cardiovascular Responses to Intravenous Catheterization in Normotensive and Hypertensive Blacks and Whites,”
Health Psychology
8 (1989): 487–501.

A 2005 study at the University of North Carolina
: M. Beth Mechlin et al., “African Americans Show Alterations in Endogenous Pain Regulatory Mechanisms and Reduced Pain Tolerance to Experimental Pain Procedures,”
Psychosomatic Medicine
67 (2005): 948–56.

Ethiopian Jews have a gene variation
: H. R. Lou et al., “Polymorphisms of CYP2C19 and CYP2D6 in Israeli Ethnic Groups,”
American Journal of Pharmacogenomics, Genomics-related Research in Drug Development and Clinical Practice
4 (6:2004), 395–401.

article by Dr. Robert R. Edwards
: Robert R. Edwards, “Individual Differences in Endogenous Pain Modulation as a Risk Factor for Chronic Pain,”
Neurology
65 (2005): 437–43.

victims of childhood sexual abuse
: See E. Walker et al., “Relationship of Chronic Pelvic Pain to Psychiatric Diagnoses and Childhood Sexual Abuse,”
American Journal of Psychiatry
145 (1988): 75–80.

2005 study published in
Human Molecular Genetics: See L. Diatchenko et al., “Genetic Basis for Individual Variations in Pain Perception and the Development of a Chronic Pain Condition,”
Human Molecular Genetics
14 (2005): 135–43.

Another recent study
: Frank Reimann et al., “Pain Perception Is Altered by a Nucleotide Polymorphism in
SCN9A
,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
107 (March 16, 2010): 5148–53.

Danish survey
: See E. Aasvang and H. Kehlet, “Chronic Postoperative Pain: The Case of Inguinal Herniorrhaphy,”
British Journal of Anaesthesia
95 (2005): 69–76.

British study found that 30 percent
: A. S. Poobalan et al., “Chronic Pain and Quality of Life Following Open Inguinal Hernia Repair,”
British Journal of Surgery
88 (2001): 1122–26.

One of Dr. Apkarian’s studies
: See A. Vania Apkarian et al., “Chronic Back Pain Is Associated with Decreased Prefrontal and Thalamic Gray Matter Density,”
Journal of Neuroscience
24 (November 17, 2004): 10410–415.

a quarter or more of Americans
: See “Health, United States, 2006: With Charts on Trends in the Health of Americans,” Centers for Disease Control, p. 74.

for a quarter of those
: Ibid., 86. “Overall, 28% of adults with low back pain said they had a limitation of activity caused by a chronic condition.”

The amount of gray matter
: See Richard J. Haier, “Structural Brain Variation and General Intelligence,”
NeuroImage
23 (September 2004): 425–33.

losses amounting to between 5 and 11 percent
: See Apkarian et al., “Chronic Back Pain Is Associated with Decreased Prefrontal and Thalamic Gray Matter Density,”
Journal of Neuroscience
24 (November 17, 2004): 10410–415.

1.3 cubic centimeters
: Ibid.

IV. FINDING A VOICE: PAIN AS NARRATIVE

“Physical pain has no voice”
: Scarry,
The Body in Pain
, 3.

treat the patient rather than the disease
: See Owsei Temkin,
The Double Face of Janus and Other Essays in the History of Medicine
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 454.

“What is the matter with you?”
: Foucault,
The Birth of the Clinic
, xxi.

Kitchen Table Wisdom: See Rachel Naomi Remen,
Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories That Heal
(New York: Riverhead, 1997).

“the factors that convert”
: Eric J. Cassell,
The Nature of Suffering and the Goals of Medicine
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 46.

Chosen integrative pain
: For a discussion of integrative vs. disintegrative pain, see Glucklich’s
Sacred Pain
, 33–34 and David Bakan’s
Disease, Pain, and Sacrifice: Toward a Psychology of Suffering
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 31–38, 67–85.

“One word frees us”
: See Sophocles,
The Oedipus Cycle
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2002), 165.

recruited Stanford students
: Data taken from Jared Younger, Sean Mackey et al., “Passionate Love Reduces Pain Via Activation of Reward Systems.” (Prepublication copy sent to author by Sean Mackey.)

Researchers at Oxford University
: See “Pulling Together Increases Your Pain Threshold,” University of Oxford press release, September 28, 2009.

telic centralizing: See Bakan,
Disease, Pain, and Sacrifice
, 31–38, 67–85.

“whoever was tortured”
: Jean Améry,
At the Mind’s Limits
(Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1998), 34.

“no pain or actual harm whatsoever”
: See Jay S. Bybee, assistant attorney general, “Memorandum for John Rizzo, Acting General Counsel for the Central Intelligence Agency” (August 1, 2002), 11.

2005 study led by Dr. M. Ojinga Harrison
: M. Ojinga Harrison et al., “Religiosity/Spirituality in Patients with Sickle Cell Disease,”
The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease
193 (April 2005).

Those who attended church once or more per week
: Ibid.

people who attend religious services live longer
: W. J. Strawbridge et al., “Frequent Attendance at Religious Services and Mortality Over 28 Years,”
American Journal of Public Health
87 (1997): 957–61.

nine-year analysis
: Robert A. Hummer et al., “Religious Involvement and U.S. Adult Mortality,”
Demography
36 (May 1999): 273–85. Robert Hummer and his coauthors indicate that the link they found between churchgoing and mortality is simply a statistical correlation. They don’t go as far as to say that churchgoing in itself directly reduces mortality. They note, for instance, that people who are unhealthy already are less likely to go to church.

“positive religious coping”
: See A. C. Sherman et al., “Religious Struggle and Religious Comfort in Response to Illness: Health Outcomes Among Stem Cell Transplant Patients,”
Journal of Behavioral Medicine
28 (August 2005): 359–67.

“If suffering occurs”
: Cassell,
The Nature of Suffering
, 46.

Her husband told a reporter
: Alicia Dennis, “This Man Chose to Be in a Coma,”
People
, August 10, 2009.

creating a feared-for self
: Stephen Morley et al., “Possible Selves in Chronic Pain: Self-Pain Enmeshment, Adjustment and Acceptance,”
Pain
115 (2005): 84–94.

2005 Stanford University survey
: See “Broad Experience with Pain Sparks a Search for Relief,” ABC News/USA Today/Stanford University Medical Center Poll, May 9, 2005.

Angel of Anatomy
: Mary Lowenthal Felstiner,
Out of Joint
:
A Private and Public Story of Arthritis
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), xiv and 201.