Because I look, "Just fine," I've avoided books about disabilities and chronic illnesses and dealt with the stares, the rudeness and sometimes the outright hostility that arises from being very ill, but not terminal and looking like I was as healthy as everyone else.

This book made me laugh, cry and wish I could have given it to my family and friends to read 15 years ago so they could understand how disheartening it was to be told the many hurtful things people say to those whose disabilities aren't immediately evident. For some reason, our society, our families and even our doctors, feel that patients must be lying if modern medicine isn't working. I was luckier than many of the people in the case studies in this book, and unluckier than some, and have lost many friends who never seemed to quite get that the energy on the inside just didn't equate to the outside packaging and that faking it just made my situation worse.

This is written from the perspective of people who have been there and who are on many different places on that path. It should be required reading for ANY pain clinic worker, medical student, psychologist dealing with pain patients, or psychiatrist! That is how much of an insite this offers to the way many of us feel.

I wish that every doctor who refused a patient adequate pain treatment and every psychologist or psychiatrist who tried to tell a patient it was all in their head just because western medicine couldn't figure it out yet had been required to read this and had been required to check their egos at the door when they picked up their degrees. ( )