This book makes understanding of pain more easy for medics and paramedics and patients. Particulary to educate patients the metaphors are great to realy understandm, and more important to remember.



summarised: A great value and applicable book!



Bart van Buchem

Physiotherapist - NL

This is very funny and very educational. I highly recommend this book if you have back pain but your scans show that your back is not broken. That is me. I am hopeful that I can get better and this book helps me realise that I probably can.

Learning can be fun. This book proves that saying correct. I thought it was dam good and I am not a physitian and I am not someone with pain. My brother lent me his copy because he has back pain and I read it on the train to work. He said it was really good. i must admit i was skepticle. But then the person next to me said that must be good because I was giggling at Dustys bum crack, which is one of the storys that the writer uses to explain why things hurt more when we are already worried about them. that makes sense to me. the writer is a professor at oxford univeristy in england so it kicks that he has a story about dustys bum crack! so I told the person next to me to go and buy it too. I am the first to complain about bad products so I thought i should congratulate this guy on a really kicking book. it is seriously way out there for hilarious reading.

Great book. Quirky, funny, easy reading. A painless (!) way to learn some lessons about chronic pain. To read a full review on my pain management website, How to Cope with Pain, visit:
http://www.howtocopewithpain.org/blog/126/here%e2%80%99s-how-you-can-laugh-while-learning-about-pain/.

This is a brilliant! It taught me more about pain than my doctors did and i read it twice because it was so funny. Highly recommended!

This book helps break down the stigma and misunderstandings commonly associated with pain. The stories, like pain, are truly "human", and we can all easily relate to them.
Moseley's true skill though (an enviable one), is to be able to create such laugh out loud humour without diluting the message the book contains.
This is a must read for anyone with chronic pain or closely associated with someone suffering pain. It is a great tool for health professionals who, like me, spend many hours a day encouraging people to understand pain more, and fear it less.

David Hall, Physiotherapist and Health trainer

This is an excellent little book. It is clearly written by an expert because it is so informative and so accurate but you don't have to know anything at all about biology to understand it. There is nothing pretentious about this, which is surprising because the author is an Oxford University academic. Painful yarns should be required reading for every medical training programme. I gave my copy to my GP and she loved it too!

I have spent a few thousand pounds on pain management programs. This doctor wrote a book called Explaining Pain, and that was worth more than all the injections and surgery i had. So when i heard he had written another one, i just had to have it. I think it is even better than his first one. It is so easy to read, really funny and makes so much sense. i wish i had read it 20 years ago. All the chapters made me LOL. You are completely into the stories and then when the little explanation comes it is so obvious that you think "of course!". I highly recommend this book for anyone who has pain and wants to understand it better. I highly recommend it for anyone who doesn't have pain actually.

A truly great accomplishment from a great author. After reading explain pain and looking up more about it's creator, I couldn't wait to get my hands on this book. Although it is clearly different, he succeeded to amaze me yet again.

In this book Moseley takes science to the next level. Where scientists have written about science for other scientists, Lorimer has found the perfect way to write about the science of pain to the ordinary people, including patients in pain or professionals working with patients in pain, in a way that supposable everybody can understand.
Although Moseley is a profound researcher in pain, he doesn't write about things that we didn't knew yet, but shines a different light on the things we already saw and knew for a long time, but couldn't get our thoughts around. Using stories of real life events and relating them to pain, he makes you realize what really is going on when you're feeling pain.

Only one down side comes up thinking about this book. Since I'm graduating as a dutch physiotherapist in 2 weeks, i really wished that this book had been published about 3 years ago. It would have made my studies so much easier!! But as many men have said when arriving on a first date: better late then never...

My advice to future readers: Read it around a nice campfire. I'm sure you'll enjoy these entertaining and interesting yarns!

This book is one of those must reads for anyone working with people with persistent pain. What’s more, give this to your clients to enhance their understanding of pain neurophysiology. Learning from ‘the pain expert’ is always a powerful experience for clients. “Wow now I get it, why didn’t you explain it to me as well as this guy in the book?” “Well I guess if it is written down, you may not be as full of it as I thought.”

Painful yarns includes eleven of Moseley’s engaging stories. At the end of each yarn he provides two things: information of what this story has got to do with pain, and a one sentence take home message. As those of you who have heard Moseley’s presentations will expect, his humour draws us in and teaches us that our beliefs about pain are not founded on our life experiences or on pain science. My only regret about the book is that I now have clients saying things like “You didn’t tell that ant-in-the-ear story anything like in the book!”

At the end of Moseley’s book, he requests the reader to send in their own painful yarns. This may lead to publication of more yarns, however my take is this – how better to get your client to understand pain than to come up with their own story that helps to explain the neurobiology of pain?

This book is one I will now recommend for any clinic where they treat people with persistent pain. Its positive impact on the reader’s endogenous pain-relieving mechanisms make it a valuable read for anyone struggling with persistent pain. Here’s hoping that these types of stories can be translated and made culturally humourous.

Co Chair Canadian Physiotherapy Pain Sciences Group

I really liked this book. I am a pain physician and i have just got it back from a patient with a 15 year history of whiplash. They are spritely stories - particularly if you like an Aussie yarn. The author is obviously from Oz and speaks with fondness of the 'outback'. My partner and I were chuckling away throughout the book - you can imagine the characters really doing the things they do. My patient said that she really enjoyed it, but more importantly, it was the first time she really understood the things i was trying to tell her! I don't know if i should be pleased or disappointed. I highly recommend this book for my colleagues and also for my patients!

Laughing out loud to myself in a cafe is not a usual pastime, but it couldn't be helped. Neither could reading the book through in one sitting.
By the end I had a much better idea of what feeling pain can mean, but more importantly much less fear of it.