Lost Voices: Women, Chronic Pain, and Abuse

In this illuminating book, Dr. Nellie Radomsky explores the complexity of chronic pain in women and evidence for its association with abuse--an issue largely unrecognized by medical practitioners. Modern medical training emphasizes diagnosis and cure, but chronic pain problems often have no identifiable organic cause, and the women who suffer are often not listened to in the doctor’s office. Lost Voices: Women, Chronic Pain, and Abuse addresses how women, by gaining knowledge of the ways the medical culture--and the larger culture--have silenced them, may move into a healing process and learn to speak out. The author encourages women in pain to give voice to their buried experiences and shows them that speaking out about their experiences with abuse and chronic pain can be the first step on the road to healing.

The author explores the lost voices of women in pain through stories based on her personal encounters with patients in her practice. These women and their case histories help illustrate the interactions of chronic pain and abuse and the complexity of the doctor-patient relationship. Among the many areas Dr. Radomsky examines are:

• how the medical culture has silenced women
• chronic pain in women with a history of abuse
• the relationship of women’s healing processes and the sense of finding and expressing “lost voices”
• the doctor-patient relationship and obstacles to healing
• the limitation of medical models with respect to understanding complex chronic pain issues
• how acute and chronic pain differ and how physicians and patients alike struggle with this understanding
  
  Scientific but very readable, Lost Voices assists readers in the search for answers to complex pain problems. It is a hope-full resource for women struggling with chronic pain and personal abuse issues and an enlightening guide for physicians, therapists, and others working with these women. Professionals working in the area of chronic pain, readers involved in feminist issues, and academic physicians interested in medicine as culture will find Lost Voices a revealing book.