If Jeff Mogil and Ron Melzack are right about genetics and pain, fifty years from now, generic Tylenol tablets will seem as quaint to us as a bottle of sarsaparilla tonic. Instead, we'll take our genotype ID bracely to the local genopharmacologist to order some bespoke pharmaceuticals. Or we may rise at four A.M. to meditate on the part of our nature that is painful and feel better for it. Along with social insurance, we'll carry geno-cards that list our predispositions: photosensitivity, osteoporosis, and poor response to codeine.

Simple intervention - the time spent with a patient - is a very powerful ingredient of the patient-doctor contract. The evidence is against the traditions such as surgery for back pain being true - the evidence says it doesn't work.

Housework hassles go on, are never resolved, and will probably extend into the afterlife ('Why am I the one who takes the clouds to the dry cleaners?').

Given the ... multidisciplinary philosophy, I was surprised by the absence of alternative pain approaches - the whole spectrum of cranial-sacral massage, healing-touch therapy, and other hands-on skills that are a lifeline to many people with chronic pain. Alternative therapie are hard to evaluate, but that's no reason not to explore them.

I could still remember how having a two day old baby makes you feel faintly sorry for everyone else, stuck in their wan unmiraculous lives.

At a certain point, the soul exits from a cherished photograph, because we have come to the end of our loving projection into that moment.

There seems to be a hole in the culture where mothers went. Then, when their kids went off to school or stopped having ear infections every three weeks, they emerged from the mother zone, and like everyone else, they forgot where they'd been. Amnesia surrounding motherhood is the rule, not the exception.