All In Your Head Chapter Summary

All in Your Head: Making Sense of Pediatric Pain Book Review Pain is universal. However, pain can be difficult to configure, explain, and understand. All in Your Head: Making Sense of Pediatric Pain is an ethnographic deconstruction of chronic pain and language. Mara Buchbinder focuses on what she terms the ‘West Clinic’ – a multidisciplinary clinic in Southern California – to feature how chronic pain is communicated between children, families, and health practitioners. As Buchbinder shows, the power of language is pivotal in “examin[ing] how cultural models of mind and brains are mobilized in explanations of pain” (p. 4). Neurobiology, psychodynamics, and societal stress all influence how pain is experienced and authenticated. These explanatory models detailed by Buchbinder coalesce biomedical and cultural influences in discussing, classifying, and accrediting the cause of chronic pain. The interdisciplinary team at the West Clinic utilize various models and metaphors to “legitimize mysterious symptoms” (p. 89). Some endemic metaphors include ‘smart neurons’ and ‘sticky brains.’ As

Despite her clear elucidation of the explanatory models used at the West Clinic, she fails to reconcile a veritable solution and explanation of how chronic pain would be framed in patients who contradict those pre-conceived models. An example of this failure is embodied in the experience of Jason Katz. Katz’s outcome after the treatments reveal how the interpretation and meaning of pain is socially constructed as the clinical and familial explanations of pain were in dispute. Buchbinder even acknowledges how “Jason was being stretched to fit [the clinic’s] mold” (p. 164) yet she was unable to question the clinic or act out due to her role as an