I saw this on Twitter today. I get it - people want to feel listened to rather than lectured. It also highlights the difference between empathy and sympathy. I come from a family with a long history of chronic pain and other health issues. I spent much of the past two decades making a film about the mind body connection...
[caption id="attachment_26522" align="alignnone" width="800"] self portrait on the first day of the festival[/caption] My memory is more metaphorical than factual. I had it in my head that my band Sleepyhead went on our first tour in the summer of 1991, our second year as a band, and that the tour ended in August in Chapel Hill (where I grew up). That...
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”- Upton Sinclair This quote is often bandied about when people who believe Dr John Sarno's story - that most back pain is caused by repressed emotions - want to make the point that he saw something that threatened his salary, bucked the...
The following definition of pain was established in 2017 by a taxonomy task force of the International Association for the Study of Pain: "Pain is an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience that is associated with actual or potential tissue damage or described in such terms." If it is read carefully it is clear that pain is both a physical and...
Recently I saw a tweet from an editor seeking science/medicine pitches because he was taking over a new full-time role at a newspaper. I sent him a note with a link to our film "All The Rage," suggesting that he either allow me to write a first-person piece about our experience of making and distributing a film that focused on...
I will be 55 years old in a few weeks. White. Jewish. Grew up in Queens, then Long Island. Attended SUNY at Albany and received my J.D. from Fordham University School of Law. Moved to Westchester County, NY in 1994 with my husband, and I am a mother of two children; my daughter is almost 25 and my son is...