Word: sternbach
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DIED. LEO STERNBACH, 97, chemist and inventor of the widely used antianxiety drug Valium; at home in Chapel Hill, N.C. Born in Austria and educated in Poland, he began his career with Hoffmann-La Roche Inc. in Switzerland before coming to the U.S. Sternbach collected 241 patents in his career; he also developed the tranquilizer Librium, the sleeping pill Mogadon, Klonopin for epileptic seizures and Arfonad to control bleeding during surgery...
Pattern of Responses. It is only since World War II that the investigation of pain has been pursued as energetically as the search for disease-causing microbes. One of the difficulties that must be understood, says University of Wisconsin Psychologist Richard A. Sternbach, is that pain is not a "thing," and certainly not a single, simple thing, but an abstract concept used by observers to describe three different things: "1) A personal, private sensation of hurt; 2) a harmful stimulus, which signals current or impending tissue damage; and 3) a pattern of responses, which operates to protect the organism from...
...pain researcher views this pattern depends mainly on his specialty, Sternbach told a pain symposium last month at the City of Hope Medical Center in Duarte, Calif. Each investigator, he said, is "locked in" to thinking of pain in his own terms. Thus the psychologist views it as a basic, elementary sensation like sight or hearing. To the psychiatrist, it is an affect or emotion, like depression or anxiety; to the analyst, the product of an internal psychic conflict; to the neurologist or neurosurgeon, a pattern of neurophysiological activity. The biologist emphasizes its survival value. The existential philosopher, Frederik...
...personality trait, regardless of culture, that most consistently accompanies exaggerated sensitivity to pain, says Sternbach, is neurotic anxiety. This is not the anxiety associated with a specific situation, such as an impending operation, but the persistent, seemingly baseless anxiety that often has its roots in the unconscious. From many observations, Sternbach concludes: "The quiet, brooding, anxious and resentful individual is the one who is most likely to have symptoms of pain and is least able to tolerate them." By contrast, victims of the more crippling emotional illnesses, the psychoses, are far less likely to complain of pain...
...comes and goes, with a few exceptions such as some cases of cancer. Nearly all the rest of the pain that patients call 'constant' or 'unremitting' is psychological." This is not to say that such pain is not "real." Most medical authorities now agree with Sternbach, who says: "Excluding the malingerer, who by definition is a deliberate faker, all pain is real." It does no good for a doctor to say "It's all in your mind." The important thing for the pain-relieving physician to do is to determine the source of the pain...