I just finished reading an unusually fascinating new book from Farrar Straus, Melanie Thernstrom's THE PAIN CHRONICLES: Cures, Myths, Mysteries, Prayers, Diaries, Brain Scans, Healing, and the Science of Suffering ($27). As the title suggests, the book is partly personal, but only a very small part. It was the author's personal encounters with pain that led her to extensively research the whole area of chronic pain, "a serious, widespread, misunderstood, misdiagnosed, and undertreated disease." Thernstrom interviewed the most distinguished pain specialists in the country and visited seven of the top pain clinics, where "most of all [she] was struck by the contrast between the physician's and the patient's point of view: the difference between the patient's understanding of their suffering and the doctors' understanding , and the complex nature of the medical encounter." In the medical world, chronic pain has only recently been recognized as a disease instead of a symptom, and medical research has discovered that untreated pain not only pathologically changes the central nervous system but those changes in turn cause even greater pain, even after the original cause is no longer present. These are just a few of the discoveries in the new field of pain medicine that Thernstrom writes about it in this absorbing book.