Where Does It Hurt?: Life With Chronic Pain - A memoir

4.5/5 ( ratings)

The true experts when it comes to understanding the problem of persistent pain, its impact and potential solutions, are those challenged by pain who take on a journey of discovery and manage an often remarkable recovery. Here is a book written by such an expert.
--Lorimer Moseley, PhD., professor of clinical neurosciences and chair in physiotherapy at the University of South Australia, Adelaide.

Why do some people continue to feel pain long after they've healed? How can people feel pain from limbs that have been amputated? And what makes people with horrific injuries sometimes insensitive to pain? The truth is that pain is far from straightforward, and most of what is now known about it has only recently been discovered. Part memoir, part medical investigation and part manifesto for non-medical cures, Tim Atkinson's candid and revealing memoir about his own experience of living with chronic pain will help start a conversation one the subject of this medical mystery.

But although “Where Does it Hurt?" is about life with chronic pain, it is anything but a misery memoir. After all, some people actually enjoy it, and they're in the book as well. There have been huge strides in pain science in the last five years and the plethora of pain books testifies to an insatiable market. But there is a need for a book by someone with their own story to tell, an "expert" as the world's leading pain scientist Professor Lorimer Moseley says. And after twenty years suffering constant pain from chronic arthritis Tim Atkinson is certainly that.

Chronic pain has been called 'the silent epidemic' and affects more than two fifths of the UK population. It has been declared a disease in its own right by the World Health Organisation. Tim Atkinson's account of a life lived with chronic pain and his attempts to kick a dangerous opioid addiction is a moving story of a personal struggle shot through with the latest science. And with a happy ending!