Listening to Pain

Finding words, compassion, and relief

by David Biro, M.D., Ph.D.

Pain and the Mirror

The way we communicate an invisible, interior event like pain is by remaking it to be visible and external. Read More

The weapon metaphor—describing pain as stabbing, shooting, burning—is the most common way we speak of pain primarily because of its implicit subtext, namely injury to the body. It is through injury that we learn about pain as children, when we cut our hand on a sharp object, for instance, or move it too close to the fire. Read More

Imagining Pain

As I've discussed in recent postings, the major obstacle in trying to communicate pain is its invisibility. It is difficult for the person experiencing pain to see it, just as it is for the person observing pain from the outside, a doctor or family member. But there is a way around this obstacle: Metaphor. Read More

On the Bright Side: We Are Wired for Empathy

Thus far in my posts I've painted a pretty bleak picture of pain from all vantage points. Pain routinely turns a sufferer inward, to the body that's crying out for help. But because the inside world is invisible, it's difficult to communicate how one feels to other people. Nor is it much easier for observers of pain, doctors and caregivers. Read More

The Divisiveness of Pain

For me the essence of things are almost always best captured in the idiom of art. And there's no better representation of what it's like to suffer than Auden's poem "Surgical Ward." Here there is none of the rush and inarticulateness of everyday reality, with doctors running to and fro and patients unable to get a word in edgewise. Read More

If Only There Were a Pain Scanner

Neuroscience has made great strides in last few decades and promises to uncover more about the mind and how it is brought into being by the brain. Read More

The Loneliness of Pain

David Foster Wallace, the acclaimed writer, suffered from depression. The first line of a short story he wrote captures one of the most underappreciated but devastating insights about the experience of pain: Read More

Between Two Cultures

Doctors are known for thinking objectively-sometimes at the cost of empathy. My mixed background as a practicing physician and a writer with a Ph.D. in English literature has in many ways placed me in a strange middle ground between what C.P. Read More

David Biro, M.D., Ph.D., practices in New York and teaches at the SUNY Downstate Medical Center. His book, Listening to Pain, draws upon his background in literature and personal experience with illness.

more...