Paintracking : your personal guide to living well with chronic pain

by Deborah Barrett

Millions of people suffer from debilitating chronic pain from arthritis, fibromyalgia, low back pain, chronic headache syndromes, neuropathies, or other painful conditions. People contending with chronic pain often spend considerable time, energy, and money searching for answers and visit multiple doctors, trying anything to find relief. When the source of pain is unclear or difficult to diagnose, their experiences are additionally frustrating, exhausting, and depressing. This book offers a hands-on approach to improving life with chronic pain, whatever the underlying cause. As a sociologist, psychotherapist, and someone with firsthand experience with chronic pain, the author understands the challenges that accompany pain and has devised realistic strategies to fare better.Paintracking provides a systematic method that empowers individuals to navigate the otherwise overwhelming array of treatment options and incorporate the effective ones into their lives for continued, incremental progress. Its cornerstone is a self-study tool that enables readers to improve. Readers are instructed on how to track and interpret their experience, whether using a pen and paper or the online tool offered as a companion to the book. By cultivating awareness of how their body responds in different situations and to different therapies, readers will become capable self-advocates, able to make informed choices. Written in clear, understandable prose and filled with sociological insights, therapeutic lessons, practical tips, and empathy, this book offers realistic hope to individuals who often feel hopeless in the face of confusing, debilitating pain.

Genres: Health

400 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2011

Reviews

[Liaken · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the best book on managing chronic pain that I have yet encountered. Written by a woman with chronic pain, this book is filled with grounded, practical, and realistic advice and practices. As I read, I found myself saying, "yes!" as I encountered her ideas and saw how clearly they lined up with things that have helped me. It also offered me new ways to think about and approach my pain.

[Blue Henderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Book has lots of good ideas and resources to help discover things that trigger, worsen, prevent, or relieve pain and other symptoms.

[Emma · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting approach to living with pain- as you can tell by the title it has a lot to do with tracking your pain and other things you do/ don't do to find out what helps, what makes it worse and what does not seem to matter.

[Tinasiragusa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good research and explanations as to why tracking is useful. Can generalize the info to all chronic pain. Offers very helpful templates.

[Tami · Rating 4 out of 5]

At the beginning of Paintracking, the author mentions that in our society pain is treated as something temporary. Basically, take a pill or rub on a cream and the pain will subside. Of course, this view doesn’t reflect the reality of chronic pain.

Few resources teach chronic pain sufferers about how to cope day to day with pain or other chronic symptoms. Even fewer urge us to explore our boundaries to create a workable life plan. These are usually things that we have to work out ourselves, after we come to the realization that despite our new realities we still want to live a happy productive life.

Paintracking is divided into three sections. In the first section, Paintracking, we are encouraged to track our symptoms not only to find our unique triggers and boundaries but also to create coping and thriving strategies. To me, this is the crucial step for anyone suffering from any sort of chronic conditions. Especially in the beginning, it’s easy to see limitations and believe that our lives will forever be diminished.

The next two sections (Pain-Treating and Pain-Living) provide generalized advice about pain management and living with chronic pain. Unlike Paintracking, these other parts are far more prescriptive. Moreover, since no two sufferers are the same and different forms of chronic pain can be very different animals, the goal here is to cover as much ground as possible. Probably the best advice is to focus on the parts that make the most sense to you.

[JoyfulK · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book provides an extremely useful set of methods that can be used to design a custom form for quickly tracking a wide range of health data. I recommend it to anyone trying to track the progress of symptoms or treatments---and to doctors and therapists who work with people who are tracking symptoms.