Allan I. Basbaum, PhD
Allan I. Basbaum, PhD, chair of the department of anatomy at the University of California, San Francisco, and editor-in-chief of Pain.
Date: October 21, 2008
Measuring and characterizing pain so that it can be understood and treated is a real challenge in the medical world, with even the most sophisticated facilities and physicians resorting to simplistic scales using numbers and happy/sad faces to quantify the intensity of a particular patient’s experience. Adding insult to injury is the matter of how isolated people with chronic pain often feel — they not only must cope with the physical suffering, but also with the emotional toll of being set apart from the rest of the world, cut off from physical activities and feeling like a burden, a whiner, a nag. If only others could see chronic pain, the way you can look at an injury and imagine how bad it must hurt or watch the numbers rise on a thermometer and identify with how sick someone must be to have such a high fever. Just being understood often can make people feel a little better and also help the doctor provide better treatment. One way this is being done today is through art.
Many hospitals in this country now offer some form of art therapy as a way to help patients express what they are feeling, emotionally as well as physically. Of course, the experience of pain has long been portrayed on canvas. For decades, prominent Yale-trained surgeon and author Bernie Siegel, MD, has encouraged his patients to demonstrate through art how they felt about their illness and treatment.
I called Allan I. Basbaum, PhD, pain expert and chair of the department of anatomy at the University of California, San Francisco. He is editor-in-chief of Pain, the medical journal of the International Association for the Study of Pain, which recently featured cover art from an online exhibition of work from people expressing their chronic pain. The cover was for a special issue on women and pain. (To view a sampling of the exhibition, go to www.painexhibit.com.)
Dr. Basbaum enumerated some of the immediate benefits he has seen patients derive from the exercise of demonstrating what pain feels like through artwork…
If you have no ability or training in art, you may believe that attempting to draw physical and/or emotional pain is off-limits for you. But, Dr. Basbaum strongly disagrees — lack of artistic ability or training doesn’t matter in the least, he says. For instance, children who have limited ability to express in words what they are going through can demonstrate clearly what is happening to them just using stick figures. He recalls how several small children suffering from migraine headaches drew simple but insightful sketches of their pain — one made a circle to represent his head and slashed a black X across it… another drew a similar circle head but added arrows piercing it. “Artistically speaking, some drawings of pain are good and some are not, but all of them are expressive,” he says, and that, of course, is the goal.
If you find the concept interesting, but aren’t sure how to get started, here are some ideas to experiment with:
Dr. Basbaum says that he sees no negatives to the practice of using art to express pain. “It’s like chicken soup,” he says, “there is no downside.”