The Song Of Our Scars: The Untold Story Of Pain, by Haider Warraich

This book was a disappointing one to read, because it could have been a great book but ended up being only an okay book, mixed in its nature. Let us talk about the good things first. The author has an obvious empathy for those who suffer with chronic pain because of his own experience of chronic back pain that began, apparently, while he was playing basketball and that have continued to this day. His own frustrations with how pain is treated by the medical establishment in which he is a part influenced him to take a strong interest in pain, and he obviously knows a lot about pain itself and the way that pain has been viewed and treated across history. His condemnation of the way that Western medicine has turned pain into a one-dimensional ticket to big pharma profits and social misery is also rather on point, even if it is neither a particularly new or a particularly happy tale. When the author is engaged in these subjects, one gets a sense of his righteous anger at those who have exploited the pain of people only to increase their misery and difficulty by giving them drugs that only deal with pain in the short term and not in the long term, especially since they hijacked a palliative model that was appropriate for those who only had a short time remaining on this earth and turned it into a more general model to deal with pain via addictive opiates that hijack the body’s own pain management systems. The author is also very skilled in talking about the pain of trauma and chronic pain as a memory that is often cherished within the brain but which can cause immense problems for someone.

Unfortunately, this book is not only a good book, and especially towards the end, the author’s biased perspective makes it hard for him to deal in a sufficiently impartial manner about pain. This is the flip side of the author’s personal commitment, in that he does not understand the negative sides of being so close to his subject. This is especially true in his political biases that reflect themselves when it comes to blindly supporting those he assumes to be subaltern “oppressed” classes of people, in that he views the behavior of the United States as being a deliberate attempt to cause others to suffer. The author’s religious biases are no less offensive and fatal to his credibility, in that he considers Muslim and Buddhist traditions as showing people how to accept pain but does not view the Judeo-Christian biblical tradition with the same charity, instead viewing it as a tradition that was callous and hard-hearted towards pain. The author’s inability to honor Western society at all, and only see its approaches as pain, whatever they are, as negative, indicates that the author has no business trying to make himself an authority on anything because he has prejudice in his own heart he needs to repent of and overcome. Until he does that, his writings will unfortunately be fairly useless, which is a shame.

In terms of its contents, this book is a bit more than 250 pages long. It begins with a personal introduction. After that, the author talks about how it is that we interpret agony through the way that we talk about pain (1). This is followed by a discussion of the biology of acute pain (2), which demonstrates the author’s awareness of recent scientific research in the subject. After this comes a discussion of how chronic pain tends to erase a person’s sense of self and social identity (3), as well as a discussion of the fundamental nature of chronic pain within the body (4). After this the author moves from a biological to more of a historical account of the history of opium and the cultural transformation of pain that took place in the 1800’s (5). After this, the author talks about how the palliative care movement helped people to overcome their fear of pain killers (6). This is followed by a discussion of how big pharma hijacked the growing support for use of pain killers in very targeted and specific cases for permanent profits (7). At this point, the author (rather unfortunately), takes the book in a sociological direction by opining on injustice and its relationship to suffering (8), before discussing the future of pain and pain science (9) as he closes. The book ends with acknowledgements, notes, and an index.