Principles & Practice of Pain Medicine, 2e > Part III. Psychological Evaluation and Treatment of Chronic Pain > Chapter 13. Psychosocial Assessment of Chronic Pain R. Joshua Wootton

Psychosocial Assessment of Chronic Pain: Introduction

"Why does one patient develop chronic pain and face disability, while another—with seemingly the same injuries, extent of tissue damage, and quality of medical care—recovers and returns to normal activity following a brief convalescence? Arguably, there may be biologic variables between the two that are difficult to discern medically, but a comparison, in most cases, is likely to reveal that the greater portion of the variance consists of psychosocial differences. When pain physicians wonder why a patient fails to respond to procedures and medications that have proven efficacious for many others with the same medical presentation, it is frequently the pain psychologist who can offer the most reasonable and, more importantly, functional set of hypotheses...."