This book explores how person-centred health care could be refined to help persons alleviate pain-related distress and construct pain as a potentially positive experience. Rethinking Pain in Person-Centred Health Care is a fascinating contribution to the multidisciplinary literature on person-centred health care, pain and ethics.

Traditionally, Western intellectual culture has downplayed the intuitive and emotional, promoting instead rational, natural-scientific perspectives. Applied to pain, an instrumental approach promotes the immediate and effective relief of pain, due to the widespread suffering and expense it can cause. However, different persons experience pain in different ways and Buetow moves beyond a commitment to eliminate pain to exploring how benefits of pain could include creating and managing meaning from pain. Rather than always looking to put pain behind them, persons may flourish by moving around pain, through pain, into pain and above pain. Buetow argues that this model depends on adopting a person-centred approach to health care, focusing less on the condition of pain and more on mobilizing the persons who present with, and manage, pain.

This book will be of interest to professionals and academics/researchers in the fields of psychology and psychiatry who have a special interest in people with persistent pain conditions. It will also be an invaluable resource for physiotherapists, chronic pain consultants in secondary care and GPs.

Stephen Buetow is Associate Professor of General Practice and Primary Health Care at the University of Auckland, New Zealand.