From time to time, professional journals and edited volumes devote some of their pages to considerations of pain and aging as they occur among the aged in different cultures and populations. One starts from several reasonable assumptions, among them that aging per se is not a disease process, yet the risk and frequency of disease processes increase with ongoing years. The physical body's functioning and ability to restore all forms of damage and insult slow down, the immune system becomes compromised, and the slow-growing pathologies reach their critical mass in the later years. The psychological body also becomes weaker, with unfulfilled promises and expectations, and with tragedies that visit individuals and families, and the prospect that whatever worlds remain to be conquered will most certainly not be met with success in the rapidly passing days and years that can only culminate in death. Despair and depression coupled with infirmity and sensory and! or motor inefficiency aggravate both the threshold and the tolerance for discomfort and synergistically collaborate to perpetuate a vicious cycle in which the one may mask the other. Although the clinician is armed with the latest advances in medicine and phar­ macology, significant improvement continues to elude her or him. The geriatric specialist, all too familiar with such realities, usually can offer little else than a hortative to "learn to live with it," but the powers and effectiveness of learning itself have declined.

A practical handbook for senior citizens suffering from a variety of painful conditions introduces all-natural remedies for more than one hundred painful ailments, explaining how exercise can ease pain, which foods contain natural painkillers, how to use deep breathing to stop heartburn, which herbs alleviate cold and flu symptoms, and more. Original. (view table of contents)

Product Description: A landmark contribution to chronic pain literature, this contemporary text measures the intricate relationship between chronic pain and life transition events. Researchers and clinicians will appreciate The Changing Nature of Pain Complaints Over the Lifespan for its linking of life transition theories to health and illness...read more

Product Description: This book is the work of the IASP Task Force on Pain in the Elderly and outlines approaches to specific geriatric pain problems. Persistent pain is very common in elderly patients both because of the cumulative effect of progression of chronic painful diseases and because the frequency of many painful conditions increases with age...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: This much-needed book explores the issues and consequences of chronic pain in later life. Chronic pain often accompanies the non-fatal health conditions experienced by older women, but much of the professional literature virtually ignores older chronic pain sufferers...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)