In The Song of Our Scars, Haider Warraich offers a history of pain, both as a personal experience and as a medical ailment. We have only recently begun to treat pain as a purely physical sensation, and while the goal was to be able to offer safer, more reliable treatments, Warraich finds that it has actually had the opposite effect. The medical community's attitudes toward pain have inspired us to make arbitrary and ill-supported distinctions between the 'real' pain of the body and the 'fake' pain that's in your head. And they have blinded us to the possibility that sometimes learning to live with your pain is better than trying to eliminate it. In the end, Warraich considers the possibility that pain, particularly chronic pain, is sometimes more usefully treated as an emotion than a sensation-- Abridged from the publisher's description.