Word: paines
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...saying that the disorder is made up. Far from it. Both Suleiman and Podolsky have developed a strong faith in the complicated, fungible nature of the pain they experienced and still experience. Dr. Coley sees factors as abstract as "the amount of control someone has over their work situation" contributing to cases of chronic injury. Perhaps, therefore, micro-breaks and wrist stretches are not enough. In an environment as manic as Harvard, maybe there is something more than mechanical to RSIs. "I hadn t ever heard of [RSI] before I developed it." Suleiman recalls. "All of a sudden people started...
...Western medical extablishment. Especially in Boston, such dogma smacks of Mary Baker Eddy s Christian Science Movement (especially in the light of recent highly publicized cases where Christian Scientist parents let their children die for want of medical care). Up until the 1960s, the accepted model of how pain worked was the one proposed by Descartes in the 17th Century. According to Descartes, a painful sensation is strictly a physical and mechanical phenomenon, as simple as pressing a piano key and getting a tone. As a result, doctors assumed a direct correlation between tissue trauma and perceived pain...
...reality, however, may be less like a piano and more like something imagined by Rube Goldberg. Especially in back problems, doctors are increasingly faced with patients experiencing excrutiating pain that has no discernable physical origins. An October article in The New Yorker by Atul Gawande detailed the story of Rowland Scott Quinlan, an architect who experienced back pain so acute that he would vomit and for whom movement was so painful that he would often soil himself instead of getting up to go to the bathroom. But X-rays, C.T. scans and myriad other tests revealed nothing that could possibly...
...Cartesian model of pain, like the Cartesian model of consciousness, began to be seriously challenged in the 60s. In 1965, Ronald Melzack and Patrick Wall proposed the "gate-control" model of pain, which involved a gate in the spinal cord that could increase or decrease pain impulses. What was most revolutionary about the model was not the idea of the gate per se, but the contention that the gate was controlled not just by sensory impulses, but signals that came from the brain, signals, for example, like emotions. How we felt could control what we felt...
...newer model the point of the perception of pain is not the mid-point of the spinal cord but the brain itself. According to this theory, the pain impulse doesn t go through a gate. In fact, it doesn t go anywhere. It is produced where it is perceived: in the brain. The stimulus arriving from the sensory nerve alerts the brain, which produces the pain experience on its own. The pain perceptions are like the tracks on a record or compact disk, waiting to be "played." The arrival of the nerve stimulus, as Gawande writes, simply hits the play...