Meanings of Pain

Simon van Rysewyk is a University Associate in the Department of Philosophy, School of Humanities, University of Tasmania. He received his PhD in Philosophy from the University of Tasmania in 2013, and from 2013 to 2014 he was a Taiwan National Science Council Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Brain and Consciousness Research Center and Graduate Institute of Medical Humanities, Taipei Medical University, Taiwan. His interests are pain, phenomenology, experiential research methods, and medical ethics. He is coeditor of the 2015 Springer title "Machine Medical Ethics," Vol. 74 in the series "Intelligent Systems, Control and Automation: Science and Engineering," ISBN 978-3-319-08108-3.

A call for study on the meanings of pain.- Pain and the dangers of objectivity.- Neural plasticity and the malleability of pain.- The emotional perception of phantom limb pain.- Is pain unreal.- The contribution of new technological breakthroughs to the neuroscientific research of pain communication.- A scientific and philosophical analysis of meanings of pain in studies of pain and suffering.- An interpretative phenomenological analysis of non-malignant chronic low back pain.- Phenomenology of chronic pain: De-personalization and re-personalization.

"Meanings of Pain offers an intriguing investigation into the implications of the psychological, sociological, and personal lived meanings of pain for the overall management of patients struggling with this chronic condition. ... it may prove invaluable to the physician struggling to understand the intricacies of the patient pain experience, facilitating improved comprehensive pain therapy." (Emily E. Smith-Straesser and Amanda M. Kleiman, Anestesia & Analgesia, Vol. 125 (5), November, 2017)