A modern chronicler of hell might look to the lives of chronic-pain patients for inspiration. Theirs is a special suffering, a separate chamber, the dimensions of which materialize at the New England Medical Center pain clinic in downtown Boston. Inside the cement tower, all sights and sounds of the neighborhood -- the swans in the Public Garden, the lanterns of Chinatown -- disappear, collapsing into a small examining room in which there are only three things: the doctor, the patient and pain. Of these, as the endless daily parade of desperation and diagnoses makes evident, it is pain whose presence predominates.
''Yes, yes,'' sighs Dr. Daniel Carr, who is the clinic's medical director. ''Some of my patients are on the border of human life. Chronic pain is like water damage to a house -- if it goes on long enough, the house collapses. By the time most patients make their way to a pain clinic, it's very late.'' What the majority of doctors see in a chronic-pain patient is an overwhelming, off-putting ruin: a ruined body and a ruined life. It is Carr's job to rescue the crushed person within, to locate the original source of pain -- the leak, the structural instability -- and begin to rebuild: psychically, psychologically, socially.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C02E4DD163FF935A25751C1A9679C8B63&sec=health&spon=&pagewanted=all
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