Adrianne Leigh Mcevoy

Will You Know My Pain?: the Necessity of Empathy in Effecting Pain Management Adrianne Leigh Mcevoy

While knowledge and skill may be enough for a health care provider to treat many a disorder and disease, it often isn't enough to treat pain. This book, written for anyone involved in health care ¿ providers, patients, and their loved ones ¿ answers the following: What is the nature of pain? Of empathy? What is empathy's role in effective pain management? Empathy, an understanding of what another is experiencing and how that experience is affecting the other, is a necessary component of effective pain management. So too is understanding the ontology of pain: pain is a multi-dimensional phenomenon influenced by many factors above and beyond tissue damage. Pain involves sensation, emotional affect, and cognition. Absent any of these, the experience is not one of pain. Empathy is a bridge for the epistemic gap between the patient¿s subjective experience of his pain and the provider¿s objective experience. A provider cannot know her patient¿s pain in the same way the patient does; nor should she become emotionally affected by it. Yet to be able to effectively manage pain, the provider must understand, she must grasp, the pain experience from the patient¿s perspective.