Practical / Recommended Reading for Chronic Pain Patients

(Alphabetical Order by Title)

 

Living Beyond Your Pain: Using Acceptance and Commitment Therapy to Ease Chronic Pain by JoAnne Dahl PhD, Tobias Lundgren MS and Steven C. Hayes PhD

Based on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), this book focuses on ways you can learn to limit the control that pain exerts over your life. Using a step-by-step program which includes mindfulness exercises and ways to change a self-defeating perspective about pain experience,  this book helps you re-assert control over your pain experience and at the same time commit to meaningful methods and actions that help you to lead a richer and more fulfilling life.

 

Managing Pain Before It Manages You by by Margaret A. Caudill, M.D. Ph.D.

Includes a practical program to help you reduce pain and learn effective coping skills to reassert control over your life experience. It provides step-by-step techniques, activities, and worksheets, all helping you to understand the causes of chronic pain, recognize what increases and decreases your symptoms, ways to assist in reducing your pain and distress, making informed decisions about treatment choices, adding relaxation-meditation and exercise into your daily routine, as well as ways to set realistic goals.

 

Mastering Pain: A 12-Step Program for Coping with Chronic Pain by Richard A, Sternbach, M.D.

One of the initial practical and easy-to-follow programs to manage chronic pain experience.

 

The Chronic Pain Care Workbook: A Self-Treatment Approach to Pain Relief Using the Behavioral Assessment of Pain by Michael J. Lewandowski, Ph.D.

Tools / Assessments in this book focus on ways to control your pain-management process.  Assisting you to change your responses to pain, to accurately monitor and improve your levels of physical activity, to address your emotional pain, sleep habits, and daily functioning, this book’s practical advice leads you toward reducing suffering, achieving consistently higher activity levels, and ultimately gaining a greater degree of life fulfillment.

 

The Mindfulness Solution to Pain by Jackie Gardner-Nix and Jon Kabat-Zinn

A mindfulness-based chronic pain management program that helps you harness the mind’s power to quiet pain and improve your sense of control over it. While acknowledging that medication and physical treatments can be beneficial to the body, this books also highlights how to take advantage of the mind’s healing abilities to maximize pain relief.

 

The Pain Survival Guide: How to Reclaim Your Life by Dennis C. Turk, Ph.D.  and Frits Winter, Ph.D.

A proven 10-step program with workbook exercises and behavior logs designed to bolster hope and assist you to get relief, showing you how gradual changes in specific behaviors can lead to great improvements in your ability to cope. No promise of miracle cures; help to "not to let your body push you around.”