Processing Pain

Max Shen

What WW2 taught us about pain

It’s WW2, the Nazis are sweeping across Europe. You’re an American doctor, fresh out of med school, when you get enlisted and immediately sent as part of the med team for the campaign at the Anzio beachhead in Italy. You arrive in the middle of the night right

Chronic pain does not make sense under the (bio)medical model

Everyone knows that pain is what happens when your body is hurt. When you first skinned your knee on the sidewalk, you cried because our knee was damaged and you were bleeding. When you stubbed your toe on the table leg last week, it hurt because the muscles and ligaments

Why you need a philosophy of pain

I have to confess that this title is misleading. You don’t need a philosophy of pain because you already have one. In fact, you can’t deal with pain without an underlying philosophy. Whether you’re a clinician or someone experiencing persistent pain, you operate on a theory of

Introducing Processing Pain

Years ago, as a graduate computer science student, I experienced severe chronic pain. I was passed from doctor to physiotherapist to acupuncturist but nobody had an explanation for the pain, and nobody could alleviate my symptoms. Having already done research in cognitive science, I decided to do a large literature