M. Swerdlow – författare

When the editors asked me to write a foreword to this book I felt very honoured but somewhat embarrassed. I am not a physician but I have spent many years dealing with the organizational problems of the care and assistance of cancer patients who have no hope of recovering. The Floriani Foundation became active in 1977 with a donation from my wife and myself following a sad family experience. The aim of this Foundation is to assist research, studies and diffusion of information in order to better the quality of life of people suffering from debilitating chronic disease, the most important of which is cancer. In the past the Floriani Foundation has sponsored and org.an- ized congresses and meetings on the subject of cancer pain relief. The proceedings of those meetings were published and have reached a limited number of people, mainly specialists in this field. It is therefore a pleasure to have been able to help the editors of this book which should reach a much wider audience, particularly among those general practitioners in the developed and developing countries who are directly involved in the treatment of these suffering populations.I hope that the information it contains will be useful in offering support to these suffering patients who still receive very little attention from medical practice.

When the editors asked me to write a foreword to this book I felt very honoured but somewhat embarrassed. I am not a physician but I have spent many years dealing with the organizational problems of the care and assistance of cancer patients who have no hope of recovering. The Floriani Foundation became active in 1977 with a donation from my wife and myself following a sad family experience. The aim of this Foundation is to assist research, studies and diffusion of information in order to better the quality of life of people suffering from debilitating chronic disease, the most important of which is cancer. In the past the Floriani Foundation has sponsored and org.an­ ized congresses and meetings on the subject of cancer pain relief. The proceedings of those meetings were published and have reached a limited number of people, mainly specialists in this field. It is therefore a pleasure to have been able to help the editors of this book which should reach a much wider audience, particularly among those general practitioners in the developed and developing countries who are directly involved in the treatment of these suffering populations. I hope that the information it contains will be useful in offering support to these suffering patients who still receive very little attention from medical practice.

The past few years have seen the publication of a large number of articles and not a few books on the subject of relief of intractable pain. New ideas have been put forward on pain mechanisms, new methods of treatment have been reported and improved results c1aimed, and a growing catalogue of complications oftreatment has been recorded. The vast and expanding literature on the subject poses for the reader the dual problems of surveil­ lance and of assessment. The object of the present book is to provide a critical and constructive review of current writings and ideas on a wide range of aspects of the nature of intractable pain, particularly of present day practice and new ideas on treatment. Each chapter is written by an acknowledged authority and the approach throughout is practical rather than academic. In editing the individual chapters an effort was made to achieve a contemporary approach and to eliminate material which was unduly historicalor retrospective in content. At the same time the individ­ ual style of the authors was retained as far as possible. For decades chronic pain has been a therapeutic ''no man''s land''. For the surgeon pain was an unfortunate complication wh ich not infrequently followed surgery; for the physician it was a distressing symptom in a number of disease syndromes; to the psychiatrist it was one of a number of features in many cases of mental illness.