About this item
A doctor's personal and unsparing account of how modern medicine's failure to understand pain has made care less effectiveInThe Song of Our Scars,physicianHaider Warraich offers a bold reexamination of the nature of pain, not as a simple physical sensation, but as a cultural experience.Warraich,himselfa sufferer of chronic pain,considers the ways our notions of pain have been shaped not just by science but by politics and power,bywhose suffering mattered and whose didn't.He weavesa provocative historyfrom theRenaissance, when paintransformed into a medical issue,throughthe racial legacy of pain tolerance,to the opiate epidemics of both thenineteenthandtwenty-firstcenturies, to the cutting edge of present-day pain science. Theconclusionis clear: only by reckoning with both pain'scomplicated historyanditsbiologycan today's doctors adequately treat their patients' suffering.
About the Author
As a physician, writer, and clinical researcher, Haider Warraich wears many hats that have come together in my upcoming book, Modern Death - How Medicine Changed the End of Life, which will be launched on February 7th, 2017, by St Martin's Press/Macmillan. The book uses science to understand death all the way from a cellular level to what it means to us as a society, uses research to trace our relationship with death all the way from the most ancient burial grounds to what it is like to die in the modern medical-industrial complex. This book is the synthesis of years of work and experience and includes more than 600 references and dozens of interviews from patients to Nobel Prize winners.
He writes most frequently for the New York Times but also contributes to the Guardian, the Atlantic, the LA Times and the Boston Globe amongst others. He writes about all things that fall within the purview of healthcare, from health policy to the daily interactions between patients and their physicians.
Dr Warraich is currently training in cardiology at Duke University Medical Center, Durham NC. Before this, he was a staff physician at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and instructor at Harvard Medical School, where he also received my training in internal medicine. His writing has been widely featured in the media and he has made appearances on CNN, PBS and FOX as well as BBC Radio and NPR to discuss them.
Dr Warraich is also an avid clincal researcher and has published in the New England Journal of Medicine, Journal of the American Medical Association, Lancet, Lancet Infectious Diseases and the Bulletin of the World Health Organization amongst others.
