A children’s book about pain

Pain doesn’t start where you feel the pain: your brain makes it. When you cut yourself, for example, all sorts of things happen in your body. Your brain can make pain immediately, or not make pain, or just make a bit of pain. In this book, we tell you how pain starts and why it sometimes doesn’t go away. We also explain why pain can be useful, and how pain protects you. This book has been written for you, your parents or other people who look after you. It’s important for you to understand what you feel and how your body works.

When pain doesn’t go away, you and your parents can spend a long time visiting different doctors, specialists and therapists. Nobody’s happy when that happens. Children and parents will hear a lot of different explanations. Doctors and therapists may tell you that something is in the wrong position, that something is blocked, that you have strained your body too much, that your muscles don’t work together very well or that your posture is wrong. And you may even get several ‘explanations’ at the same time!

But that doesn’t get rid of the pain. It can make you doubt yourself, make you think about the pain more and make you move the painful part of your body less in order to protect it.

In this book, we tell you how all that works. The drawings and the descriptions will give you a better idea of how pain starts in your body. And, of course, most importantly: what you can do yourself when you’re in pain.