The Gift of Pain Quotes

“It is a distortion to picture the human being as a teetering, fallible contraption, always needing watching and patching, always on the verge of flapping to pieces; this is the doctrine that people hear most often, and most eloquently, on all our infirmation media. . . . The great secret of medicine, known to doctors but still hidden from the public, is that most things get better by themselves. Lewis Thomas”
― Paul Brand, The Gift of Pain: Why We Hurt and What We Can Do About It

“A physical therapist in my office volunteered to run eight miles around the cement floor corridors of the Carville hospital in his stocking feet, pausing every two miles to let me take thermographic readings and test his stride in a slipper-sock. The first slipper-sock impression showed his normal walking pattern, a long stride with a high lift and a push”
― Paul Brand, The Gift of Pain: Why We Hurt and What We Can Do About It

“Pain takes place in the mind, and what calms the mind will enhance my ability to cope with pain.”
― Paul Brand, The Gift of Pain: Why We Hurt and What We Can Do About It

“Treating a disease and treating a person are very different concerns, because recovery depends in large part on the mind and spirit of the patient. Suffering, a state of mind, involves the entire person.”
― Paul Brand, The Gift of Pain: Why We Hurt and What We Can Do About It

“Pain is always a mental or psychological event, a magician’s trick the mind knowingly plays on itself.”
― Paul Brand, The Gift of Pain: Why We Hurt and What We Can Do About It

“Paradoxically, pain seems like something done to us, though in reality we have done it to ourselves, manufacturing the sensation. Whatever we might conceive of as “pain” occurs in the mind.”
― Paul Brand, The Gift of Pain: Why We Hurt and What We Can Do About It

“From all this rapid-fire activity—five trillion chemical processes a second—we form patterns of meaning about the world.”
― Paul Brand, The Gift of Pain: Why We Hurt and What We Can Do About It

“The health of the body depends largely on its attentiveness to the pain network.”
― Paul Brand, The Gift of Pain: Why We Hurt and What We Can Do About It

“Those two images, brought together by our conversation, underscored an important fact about pain: pain takes place in the mind, nowhere else.”
― Paul Brand, The Gift of Pain: Why We Hurt and What We Can Do About It

“Few experiences in life are more universal than pain, which flows like lava beneath the crust of daily life. I”
― Paul Brand, The Gift of Pain: Why We Hurt and What We Can Do About It