Why It Hurts: A Physician's Insights on the Purpose of Pain

Why must we feel pain? It is a question humans have asked for centuries. In this timely book, author and Harvard-trained pain specialist Dr. Aneesh Singla offers a physician's point of view as he takes a journey through medicine, history, and the world around us to provide some insights into our experience of pain, what we can do about it, and why it hurts in the first place. Drawing upon over a decade of experience, Dr. Singla offers an honest and insightful look at how we must balance our desire to "cure" every type of pain with the urgent need to manage the colossal problem of chronic pain, which afflicts over 116 million Americans, and many millions more across the globe. As the opioid crisis in the United States is reaching critical levels, we live in a world where misinformation about the nature of pain is all around us. Countless books offer miracle cures for all kinds of pain, with varying levels of success. However, pain can be a transformative experience, and the idea of resilience and how pain can and does make us stronger is often ignored. The fact is, humans have evolved to feel pain as a necessary part of life. From children born without the ability to sense pain, we have learned that a life without pain can have serious and often times fatal consequences. In Why It Hurts, Dr. Singla takes a sobering look at how we try and manage pain based on his work as a practicing pain specialist in the nation's largest pain practice. How each of us experience and handle our pain is deeply personal. This book offers a lens from which to see pain as more than just an inconvenience. It offers a new vision of why it hurts and what we should do about it.