This book was enormously valuable to me in helping my father through his final illness. My deepest thanks to the authors and the publisher!

Readers should know that the second author of this valuable text can no longer be reached at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, and is best reached at "RPatt@cancerpain.org."

Thanks you & best wishes,

RP

"You Don't Have to Suffer" is one of the most helpful, honest, clearly written books on the management of long-term, severe pain that I have ever read. Every cancer patient who has or fears having pain needs to own and read this book. It is also appropriate and helpful for people with severely painful, progressive conditions like endometriosis, sickle-cell disease, lupus, or any painful condition that is being treated with narcotic medications.

The clear and thorough writing in this book helped me to understand the difference between drug tollerance and drug addiction, to know why my doctors were uncomfortable prescribing appropriately strong medication, and gave me the ammunition and courage I needed to go to a pain clinic and get treatment to control my pain and allow me to live my life.

I have suffered from daily tension headaches and weekly migraines for 15 years. This book provided information about headaches in general, and also gives very detailed descriptions of the various medications available. I was able to use the book to ask my doctor about treatments he had not considered. The most valuable information I received from reading Headache Help concerned the nature of headaches. Anyone who suffers from headaches would benefit from this book. If nothing else, you'll learn that others have similar problems and that there is help out there.

Why hello everyone, If you have never read this book.. this book makes you wanna do drugs, it is a really good book... I toke up everyday now. I was a really good influence on me... Thank you for who has ever wrote this.. I have to go now so i hope you all still love me and i hope that you like to do drugs too.. BUH~BYE

I enthusiastically recommend this interesting, well-written, well-researched, easy-to-read book. Wonderful interviews with real women--not composites--are interwoven with research results and statistics. Several chapters are arranged around reasons Lang's interviewees had not had children: "The Never Married, Choosing to be Child Free, No Time Was the Right Time, When Men Don't Want to Father, Infertility and Medical Interference, and Women Who Love Women."

See chapter 11 for a refreshing look at the stereotype that childless women are selfish, including self-centered reasons that parents give for having children. See chapter 15 for an eye-opening discussion of old age and childlessness: it isn't as gloomy as you might think. The tone throughout is neutral: not anti-motherhood or anti-children.

Women like me who wanted children can probably find both comfort and information here. This book would be useful for young women considering whether to have children and also for family members or friends of childless women. Possible drawbacks (which I did not mind) are that the research and statistics are now a decade old and that one might have to settle for a used copy. Index and end notes.

For practical emotional support on how to come to terms with unwanted childlessness in only one book, read Linda Hunt Anton, "Never To Be A Mother: A Guide For All Women Who Didn't--Or Couldn't--Have Children" (1992).

As a 41-year old woman who is coming to terms with continuing my life childless, aka "child free", I found this book a wonderful source of insight and inspiration. Granted, the book is not that scientific, but it's an important book for the minority of women who, either by chance or choice -- or a little of both -- are childless.

I would recommend it to anyone who is deciding whether or not to become a parent, who is struggling with infertility, grieving the loss of a child through miscarriage, or wants to reaffirm a child free existence.

Susan Lang sought out child-free women of several generations to interview for this book. Her interviews and research gave quite a bit of insight into the emotions and reasonings of these women. Several interviews hit so close to home that I was in tears. I would strongly recommend this book to any woman trying to decide on a child-free way of life. I could see where the book might also give some comfort to those women that didn't have a choice.