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In the study that we describe in this article, we aimed to preserve the voices of people suffering from chronic pain by encouraging them to tell the story of their suffering. Participants' stories reflect how chronic pain has altered their lives. This is partly due to their discomfort, but also to the frustration they experience from delays in diagnosis and treatment. Patients often pursue a lengthy quest for medical care that culminates in the diagnosis of an 'incurable' disease and a prognosis of disability. This in turn affects patient interactions with doctors and their social network. We illustrate how chronic pain leads to a sense of alienation or 'not-belonging,' whereby patients perceive pain as an entity parallel to yet dominating their own lives.

Introduction: The production of scientific health publications is ever increasing and it is therefore essential to evaluate their quality as well as their repercussion and visibility in the scientific community, so that they can be included and indexed in the various national and international databases. The Information Center for Public Health Decisions (CENIDSP) at the National Public Health Institute (INSP) has produced since 1992 a CD ROM under the name Artemisa (articles on health information published in Mexico). In 2005 it included the full version of 56 journals which were rigorously evaluated and met the selection and evaluation criteria for inclusion., Objective: Describe the selection criteria and the evaluation process followed in 2005 to choose the biomedical journals included in Artemisa., Methodology: It consists of a description of the universe of journals to be included according to the guidelines established and of the first stage of the evaluation (journal and article format). Based on the results, journals were selected for the second stage, which consisted of evaluating the content of the articles randomly selected., Results: Twenty-one journals were included in the first stage, 19 of which were selected for the second stage. A total of 274 articles were selected for peer review by the Mexican Health Journals Evaluation System (SERM@S), with the participation of 64 evaluators. The final result of the second stage was satisfactory to all of them., Conclusion: The evaluation of biomedical journals conducted by CENIDSP has led to maintaining a quality standard of the biomedical publications in Mexico.