Chronic pain is pain that lasts for months, years or even a lifetime, and doctors have a hard time understanding it. Not only is it sometimes impossible to cure, but doctors also tend to fixate on bodily pain and not address the ways pain is also psychological and emotional. In fact, Travis Chi Wing Lau argues that this attitude goes back to the ways doctors have been trained since the eighteenth century to observe outer bodily symptoms and discount patients’ subjective experiences. Turning to Travis’s poetry, we discuss why we need poets as well as doctors to understand pain.
Bonus clips
Works mentioned
– Hilary Mantel, “Little Miss Neverwell”
– Travis Chi Wing Lau, “Pithy” from Paring
– Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain
Further reading
Travis Chi Wing Lau at Post45 – Free and Unfeeling?
Travis Chi Wing Lau – video of Distāntia remote reading
Jenny Tinghui Zhang and Travis Chi Wing Lau – novel and poetry readings at ATX Interfaces: Artist Showcase/Open Mic
Jaipreet Virdi at Wellcome Collection – Painful realities
Kev Dertadian at The Conversation – Pain isn’t just physical: why many are using painkillers for emotional relief
Writing Women’s Pain: A Roundtable at Literary Hub
Nafissa Thompson-Spires at The Paris Review – On Telling Ugly Stories: Writing with a Chronic Illness
Ellen Samuels at Disability Studies Quarterly – Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time
Atul Gawande at The New Yorker – Overkill
German Lopez at Vox – Solving America’s painkiller paradox