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...

In this article, I analyse the “publish or perish” enterprise and in particular the origins of editorial power/knowledge. My actor-network analysis shows how tenure, promotion, and salary decisions apparently unrelated to editorial decisions are important elements that accrue power/knowledge to editors of particular journals. What my actor-network analysis does not show, and which I therefore a...

dust-cover from reviews already given by daily papers and other journals. It takes a line somewhat reminiscent of behaviour therapy in encouraging individuals to believe that their symptoms are due to sensitization' and can be overcome by determination and retraining. The book is extremely well and clearly written. The problem with it is that it deals with a limited aspect of a common symptom. ...

Moral life often presents us with trade-offs between the sufferings of some individuals and the sufferings of others. Researchers may need to consider, for example, whether the suffering imposed on animals by a certain line of medical experimentation justifies the relief that the resulting discoveries may bring to (human or non-human) others. Often in such cases, the suffering of some individua...

Miss Ikin writes from the fulness of her own experience. After years of activity during the War in which she travelled up and down the country lecturing to the Forces on personal problems, both spiritual and domestic, she now finds herself extremely limited in physical ability and unable to walk more than a short distance. Consequently she knows what she is talking about, and she gives many pra...

EVERY DOCTOR WHO TREATS PATIENTS WILL CONFRONT THEIR PAIN AND suffering. Yet for each individual patient the experience of pain will be private and largely unique. This creates difficulty not only for the clinician but for anyone who tries to grasp the meaning of someone else’s pain. The sensory component of pain, the neuronal capacity to localize and identify noxious stimuli, is largely consis...