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Cognitive Therapy For Chronic Pain: A Step-By-Step Guide. By Beverly E. Thorn.
Chronic pain is a prevalent and costly problem for its sufferers and for society in general. Chronic pain has a physiologic origin but its consequences are psychosocial. Estimates suggest that twenty-five to thirty percent of the U.S. population suffers from some chronic pain condition. In addition, chronic pain is chronic. It extends for a long period of time-weeks, months, years, and even decades. Patients with chronic, persistent pain become enmeshed in the medical community, traveling from doctor to doctor, city to city, looking for the procedure, the cure, in a quest to achieve having their pain treated successfully.
The traditional biomedical view of chronic view considers it a symptom of some underlying physical pathology. Let us look at chronic low back pain as an example. The primary care clinician when doing a simple x-ray might locate one or several protruding discs. Even though the source of the pain is identified, the treatment is unclear. The quest for the Holy Grail to negate the pain then begins. With back pain, the treatment may begin with exercise and progress to steroidal anti-inflammatories, then lead to Vicodin or another narcotic drug. However, the pain is not relieved and the patient continues to endure it, even surgery the "magic cure," is not helpful.
In this volume, Beverly E. Thorn, a certified psychologist and Director of the Ph.D. Program in Clinical Psychology at the University of Alabama, has met the challenge. She starts with the assumption that the pain will continue and is challenged to help people help with the presence of pain or "-how to help them live 'with it' when their real desire is to live 'without it'." Dr. Thorn submits an informative critique of the role of cognitive process in chronic pain, then looks at relevant research on cognitive behavioral therapy, and uses her clinical experience with the cognitive part CBT to develop a treatment program for those who endure chronic pain.
The volume is structured to follow one group of patients throughout a treatment program. The format of the book is a "how-to-do-it" format. Dr. Thorn intends the book for practitioners, who are already working in a pain management clinic and have had extensive...