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Why are we, the most medicated of societies, a culture in pain? That's the piercing question author Marni Jackson poses in
Pain: The Fifth Vital Sign after a bee sting sends her on a four-year quest to explore this universal experience. Attitudes to treating pain are changing, Jackson discovers, and new approaches have begun to radically change the relationship between physician and patient. Still, suffering remains remarkably prevalent in a culture that manages to encourage addiction while withholding relief from people in discomfort. "It's slow business, educating doctors about pain and changing our attitudes toward it," Jackson writes. "If we knew more about pain treatment, would Robert Latimer, a Saskatchewan farmer, have felt he had no other recourse but to kill his severely disabled daughter, who suffered daily pain?"
The book is structured around Jackson's own divining-rod forays into the pain world. She zigzags between a minister injured in a high-speed police chase, a "pain warrior" treating cases in a Toronto clinic, her elderly mother's broken shoulder, the World Pain Congress in Vienna, self-mutilators, Florence Nightingale, a 15-year-old heroin addict, and the final days of a dying friend. Jackson's vivid storytelling makes this book a fascinating read. --Carolyn Leitch
From Booklist
Many patients and physicians have wished for a way to quantify pain as we do the other vital signs--blood pressure, temperature, heart beat, and respiration. Jackson explores the history, variety, acknowledgment, and treatment of pain, the fifth vital sign, accessibly and sympathetically, lending the subject personalism by citing her own experiences of pain, which range from a bee sting to her open mouth to anesthetic failure in the middle of a dental operation. She also mines the medical annals, citing such authorities as S. Weir Mitchell and William Livingston, and various literary works. Her interviews with pain experts make lively reading as she queries the likes of Angela Mailis of the Comprehensive Pain Program in Toronto, and Frank Adams, who was found guilty of "medical incompetence and unprofessional conduct" for humanely treating his patients' pain. Finally, her account of the Ninth World Congress on the Study of Pain, in Vienna, graphically depicts the complexity of a large meeting. A book for medical-school and hospital as well as public libraries.
William BeattyCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
