Journal of Pain & Relief
Open Access

Abstract

Psychosocial issues have been recognized as important for the understanding and treatment of pain for many decades. Their relevance has mainly been limited to chronic pain, however. Acute pain has been thought to be largely determined by nociception. Albeit there is some truth to this, research in recent years has revealed a significant influence of contextual factors in acute pain situations as well. An evolving conceptual framework for understanding the expression of pain in a psychosocial context is behavioural medicine, based on contextual behavioural science as well as on biomedicine. This presentation will use the model of emergency department pain to describe a behavioural medicine conceptual model for acute pain.

Biography