Customer Reviews

Mayo Clinic on Chronic Pain (Mayo Clinic on Health)

5 star:		(3)
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1 star:		(3)

 

 

As stated in the credits on the first page, this book provides "reliable, practical information on managing chronic pain." What it doesn't say is just how invaluable this book can be for all of us who have suffered. Until I read this book, I had not realized that I had been living with pain since before entering grade school - and this book gave me the insight and tools to face it and deal with it constructively. I bought it at the recommendation of one of my physical therapists to help with my recently diagnosed fibromyalgia, but found a wealth of information that has helped me recognize and acknowledge emotional and behavioral stages of pain that I have been cycling through, unrecognized, for decades. I had just written off my symptoms as part of being bipolar, as being something I just had to put up with. Through physical therapy and reading this book, I now see how I have become physically, emotionally, and behaviorally misaligned and crippled as the direct result of pain. This book, an easy read, almost every page post-it tagged, has drawn the interest of everyone I've shown it to or discussed it with. It explains chronic pain - how to understand it, recognize it, treat it, and manage it. It has chapters that include evaluations of standard and alternative therapies and their documented effectiveness or lack of, how to set goals, find the right doctor for your situation, deal with your emotions and behaviors, manage stress, get healthy through diet and exercise, how your pain affects those close to you, how to organize your day, and includes a personal planner, great additional resources, and more. REALLY packed with the latest tested research and developments in the area of chronic pain from one of the great medical clinics. I can't rate this book highly enough. If you or someone you know is suffering in any way shape or form from any kind of chronic pain, this book is a lifesaver. Buy it, read it, pass it around, share it with your doctor.

This is THE chronic pain management book according to my doctor, and I'm a believer. I lead a more active and productive life because of his work.

What you may not "like" about this book is the emphasis on the patient's responsibility. Once a proper diagnosis is reached, the PATIENT must do things to get better.

* Stopping what is was that caused the pain to become chronic,

* Coping with overweight,

* Dealing with uncontrolled anger, depression.

* Using the mind to relax.

* Relieving stress (and the destructive hormones it releases) to loosen up the painful area.

* Getting more sleep. Setting attainable goals.

* Assessing one's personal spiritual life (not religious, but spiritual -- there's a huge difference).


Among themselves, the Mayo Clinic pain specialitsts have different philosophies and treatments. All are covered evenly in this book.

This book reminds me of many magazine covers: it promises a lot more information than it delivers. There is very little of any specific help here. Worse, it sounds like it is written by someone who has no real idea what it is like to live with debilitating chronic pain. Run 5K??!! How about, I can't walk around the block? There is no help offered for people with pain that is more than moderate in nature. Topics that should receive some real attention are skimmed over in a matter of a couple of pages or even a few paragraphs. I had expected better from a Mayo Clinic publication.

You'd think the Mayo Clinic would be hardline Western medicine. But this book rocks. There are alternative treatments and everything.

I never did receive this book. I emailed the seller at least three times to no avail. What now, as the charges have gone through!?

This book was really boring to read for me. It spent a lot of time trying to define what pain was and all, and then it went to this big list of alternative treatments - they just listed all the possible treatments, but they didn't evaluate them further, they didn't show how effective each treatment was, you were like supposed to guess one - try it and if it helped you great and if not then try another one. - then the whole premise is to block out the pain mentally, but the problem with pain is there is usually a reason, and just because you haven't found the reason doesn't mean there isn't a problem. I like the idea of refusing to acknowledge it and let it dominate your life and conversation - giving it more power than it needs, but the book doesn' do a good job dealing with that either. it just plain lacks significan't detail. honestly all this book is - is an outline of their 16 day program. They don't give any more details of the topics covered in the program, and this is just a summary of what they do. But what are you paying this money for the book for - the brochure of the program tells you as much as this book does, and in fact when I checked out the program they told me more information just at my 30 minute meeting with them than they covered in this whole book. The book was fairly worthless and not worth the money. The ideas are good, but there's no information to back it up. If you want more you have to enroll in their program. The book is not worth the money. I wish they would have done a better job and given the book more details, but then if they did that you wouldn't need to pay the big bucks to enroll in their program. I feel pretty ripped off that I bought this book but the laundry list was actually helpful because I could then research each pain treatment so even though I don't think it's a great book - it actually helped me some.