BMJ
Viewing the pictures was a numbing and uncomfortable experience for me. As doctors we are taught to take histories, but the history and reality contained in some of the photos was almost too much to handle. I felt voyeuristic and that I didn’t want to get involved. But perhaps that is a typical doctor’s reaction. Faced with something too hard to understand and to which I felt I had no answer, I wanted to shut off. But somehow these pictures wouldn’t let me. Perhaps it was something to do with the courage that it must have taken to create them, but I found it impossible to turn away as the profession has turned away from such people in the past.
(Alex Vass editorial registrar, BMJ, 11 May 2002)

THE LANCET
This collaboration has given these patients new ways to address difficulties with communication. Concentrating from the outset on visual language, the project also successfully reinvigorates verbal narrative. The photographs are powerful and compelling; they draw you into an imaginative world that is not always immediately comprehensible and lead the viewer to the text for more insights, and then back again to the image. The patient’s descriptions of their pain … are not especially powerful when spoken or written on their own. However, such descriptions echo long afterwards when they are accompanied by precisely lit and composed images, further dramatised and intensified against black backgrounds. … Patients are unanimous in their praise of the benefits of their work with Padfield. They all feel a sense of relief at finding a verbal and visual language that can express their pain, and in so doing communicate their diverse experiences to doctors, family and friends.
(Jane Wildegoose, The Lancet, London UK, 18 May 2002, vol 359)

THE NURSING TIMES
There are times when words are not enough and the work of artist Deborah Padfield currently on exhibition at the Royal College of Physicians in London, has made a remarkable contribution to our understanding of the personal experience of chronic pain.
Using photographic techniques, the artist, herself a chronic pain sufferer and patient of Dr Pither, has produced a series of images that both disturb and enlighten. From a bath that is slowly filling and overflowing with pain to a piece of barbed wire superheated by a blowtorch, the images do more to communicate what it is like to be in pain than any number of scientific papers.