Customer Reviews

Managing Pain Before It Manages You, Revised Edition

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This book "Managing Your Pain..." is the best book I have discovered in my personal 13 year recovery journey with chronic pain. Dr. Caudill has presented the information in a clear and understandable fashion, making it easy to make effective behavioral changes as well as attitude shifts. I am also working as a pain management specialist and recommend this book to all of my clients. I have never received an unfavorable review from them. I especially like the chapters "Mind Body Connection" and "Body Mind Connection." The other important feature of this book is that the author allows people who purchase her book to copy the exercises and even makes it easy by adding removable pages for ease of photo copying. I highly recommend this to both people suffering from chronic pain and health care providers with chronic pain clients. Steve Grinstead.

This workbook is a great adjunct to cognitive-behavioral therapy for chronic pain. The techniques in the book are well-explained and can also be used by people suffering from other chronic problems, such as depression. This book is written at an intermediate reading level, making it more difficult to understand for some and too simplistic for others. However, the therapist should be able to pick and choose the chapters that are right for their client.

After decades of dibilitating pain, employing techniques offered in this book changed my life dramatically. I am now in control of my pain and my life. There is no "quick fix" to chronic pain, but with resolve and dedication to educating yourself, it is possible to live a fulfilling life even with chronic pain. This book offers just that, real life techniques and tools you can employ immediately, to change your approach to a chronic problem. I recomend this book to anyone who is serious about making positive lifestyle changes in order to manage their pain more effectively. Drugs and their negative side effects are not the only option. I have my life back after many, many years.

This book was recommended to me by my Dr. in a chronic pain clinic. I have since personally recommended it to everyone I know who suffers chronic pain. It discusses mind-body approaches,therapeutic exercises and diet as well as pain medications. It offers a program to help us help ourselves.
The book is user friendly for those not participating in a formally structured program.

This is an excellent self-help workbook. It explains what pain is and what affects it and has many exercises to help to gain control of pain. I have used this workbook to teach pain management in the chronic pain support group I facilitate.

I'm not surprised to see the blurbs from MDs and PhDs that appear in the reviews below--and the complete lack of comment from people actually IN pain.

This book talks down to the reader at all times, making it clear that the overeducated author assumes that you, dear reader, are too dumb to understand all but the most generic material.

Her language is downright painful to read--unless you are the kind of person who enjoys seeing words like "cognitive" used in every second paragraph.

But let's go beyond style to content. The author is not up-to-date in her coverage of pain therapy for several chronic diseases covered in this book, most notably Interstitial Cystitis. Despite her own claims to the contrary, her approach tends to be, "If you doctor can't find the cause of your pain, it probably is in your mind." Coupled with her poor coverage of medical treatments for pain syndromes, a sufferer from a disease like Interstitial cystitis, who reads this book might well end up taking Prozac when what she really needs is acupuncture or Elmiron.

There is lots of lip service to meditational techniques, but the author's coverage of these topics is heavy in acronyms and low in understanding. It's clear she has read a few books on the subject and feels comfortable reducing each one to a paragraph. This is one area where the "Cliff's Notes" approach will simply not work. Save your money and buy a better book!

I have had chronic pain for years and I work with people who have chronic pain.

If you are looking for self-help with chronic pain, I do not think you will be disappointed with this book. It is one of three I provide to patients to help introduce basic chronic pain coping resources. The others are the "The Pain Survival Guide," by Dennis Turk, PhD and "Hypnotize Yourself Out of Pain Now!" By Bruce Eimer, PhD. I suggest owning all three. The effectively cover a range of knowledge of what works in helping chronic pain patients help themselves.

In "Managing Your Pain . . ." Dr. Caudill describes up-to-date and proven means of controlling pain. The book is systematically structured as an effective self-help tool. Caudill explores how mind and body interact to manage pain. The book effectivly provides many well-formed exercises to effectively encourage adoption of pain management skills. I encourage patients to use it as part of their outpatient pain treatment process and routinely suggest it to patients who prefer to work on their own. In either case, many patients effectively apply it with little or no assistance. The book also offers suggestions of additional readings.

I also recommend this book to healthcare professionals who regularly, or occasionally, treat individuals with chronic pain, as an effective summary of current clinical wisdom on chronic pain.

It is important to add that, for many with chronic pain, gaining the motivation to help self is the biggest challenge. Often a first issue is determining if the cost of addressing, managing and taking responsibility to manage you pain appears worth the benefit. Caudill treats both issues with understanding and empathy.

One review titled "I am recovering from chronic pain" may not have read the book or its' cover. You don't recover from "chronic" pain, you manage and learn to cope.

That is what this book is about, not the most current drugs or treatments. It is a collection of practical tools for understanding your chronic pain, coping with and managing chronic pain in your daily life so you can more enjoy life and living. This book was the most read and used by others in a chronic pain group I went to, where I first heard of it.

If one tool doesn't work, there are many other tools and approaches for managing and learning to live life more fully with chronic pain in this book.

I wasn't nearly as thrilled with this book as some of the folks whose reviews influenced me to buy it. If you know anything about the functional anatomy of sensation/pain and/or psychology of pain, it's not for you; you won't get anything new. If you're newly diagnosed with a chronic pain syndrome, and don't have a background in any of the above, yes, it might be helpful.

Our Pain Committee reviewed several resources before settling on this workbook for our community Living With Chronic Pain Program. It has not disappointed us as we are in our 5th program cycle. Participants find it a valuable resource, the summaries are like 'cliff notes' at the end of chapters so they can keep up with the reading, and I have been very pleased with the information. It is current, helpful, and up to date.