When you catch your fingers on something really hot you usually react within seconds, getting them under cold water as soon as possible. But what’s actually happening in your body? As soon as your hand makes contact with the hot object, the specialised nerves that register and report bodily sensation send a signal to your spinal cord, up through your central nervous system and into your brain, setting in motion a sophisticated and precisely-timed response. Before you’re even consciously aware what’s happening, your hand retracts. If you can’t react quickly enough and you’re burned, your sympathetic nervous system is further activated: your metabolism kicks into high gear, your heart rate increases and your breathing accelerates. The activities of your ‘thinking’ brain are suspended briefly as all attention shifts to protection. Your body releases natural painkillers, blocking the pain so you can focus on getting away.
On the surface, pain seems like a fairly straightforward experience, but it’s actually sophisticated and complex, and culturally, our relationship with it has changed over millennia, and not for the better. Through in-depth interviews, investigation into the historical record and original research this book will challenge the notion that all pain is bad and harmful. The authors argue that understanding how pain works, how we think and talk about it, how we treat it, how it is expressed and what it means, can provide the foundation to build a healthier relationship with it. They explore pain within a framework that encompasses the suffering, the survivors, and the ‘extremists’ on the edges of society using pain for pleasure.
Ouch! dismantles the ideas that we all have about pain, and uncovers a truth that we instinctively know but seem to have lost in a misguided quest for a state of perfect painlessness.