Monday, December 05, 2005
book report: All In My Head
All In My Head: An Epic Quest to Cure an Unrelenting, Totally Unreasonable, and Only Slightly Enlightening Headache
by Paula Kamen
This book is a memoir by Paula Kamen, a woman in her thirties who has suffered from a chronic headache since her early twenties. In this book, she chronicles the treatments she pursued in the quest to cure her headache, ranging from the traditional (painkillers, antidepressants, surgery) to the downright weird (craniosacral adjustments, guided visualization, strange diets) and everything inbetween (biofeedback, massage, chiropractic). Nothing cures her, although some things do seem to help a bit.
Interspersed with Kamen's own story are facts and statistics about chronic pain and its sufferers. I found that information fascinating. Kamen calls them the "Tired Girls" because chronic pain sufferers who have pain that is not from an obvious cause tend to be young-ish women with fibromyalgia, chronic headache or migraines, lupus, chronic fatigue syndrome, and so on. All of those disorders cause chronic, disabling pain and fatigue, but without any outward symptoms or foolproof diagnostic signs. So the people who have those disorders end up seeming like they are just lazy and wimpy, and that their problems are "all in their heads".
Even as someone who is sympathetic to the "Tired Girls" - my closest friend in college had fibromyalgia, and I never doubted that she was genuinely suffering, even though I couldn't see the source of her pain - I was taken aback by the callousness that the Western medical establishment, and Western society at large, show toward them. We would never say to a person with chest pain from heart disease, "Oh, quit your whining, if you stop thinking about the pain it will go away" or "if you just weren't so emotionally uptight you wouldn't be sick." Also, I think our medical culture still doesn't give enough consideration to the effects of chronic pain - it's demoralizing and depressing to be in constant pain, especially if you're told by your doctors that you're imagining it!
Finally, Kamen is a witty and funny writer, and really captures the absurdity of her situation. I didn't expect to laugh at a book about a headahce, but I did.
by Paula Kamen
This book is a memoir by Paula Kamen, a woman in her thirties who has suffered from a chronic headache since her early twenties. In this book, she chronicles the treatments she pursued in the quest to cure her headache, ranging from the traditional (painkillers, antidepressants, surgery) to the downright weird (craniosacral adjustments, guided visualization, strange diets) and everything inbetween (biofeedback, massage, chiropractic). Nothing cures her, although some things do seem to help a bit.
Interspersed with Kamen's own story are facts and statistics about chronic pain and its sufferers. I found that information fascinating. Kamen calls them the "Tired Girls" because chronic pain sufferers who have pain that is not from an obvious cause tend to be young-ish women with fibromyalgia, chronic headache or migraines, lupus, chronic fatigue syndrome, and so on. All of those disorders cause chronic, disabling pain and fatigue, but without any outward symptoms or foolproof diagnostic signs. So the people who have those disorders end up seeming like they are just lazy and wimpy, and that their problems are "all in their heads".
Even as someone who is sympathetic to the "Tired Girls" - my closest friend in college had fibromyalgia, and I never doubted that she was genuinely suffering, even though I couldn't see the source of her pain - I was taken aback by the callousness that the Western medical establishment, and Western society at large, show toward them. We would never say to a person with chest pain from heart disease, "Oh, quit your whining, if you stop thinking about the pain it will go away" or "if you just weren't so emotionally uptight you wouldn't be sick." Also, I think our medical culture still doesn't give enough consideration to the effects of chronic pain - it's demoralizing and depressing to be in constant pain, especially if you're told by your doctors that you're imagining it!
Finally, Kamen is a witty and funny writer, and really captures the absurdity of her situation. I didn't expect to laugh at a book about a headahce, but I did.
Labels: book reports, medical
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I also suffer from a chronic pain syndrome and have had it for twenty plus years. I haven't been formally diagnosed with fibro yet but am trying to rule out the other diagnosible ones through testing. No one wants a "phantom" disease because people don't believe what they cannot see. I don't get headaches very often but when I do, they are doosies...
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