Psychotherapeutic approaches in the treatment of pain

Pain is best conceptualized as a perceptual, rather than a sensory, phenomenon. As a purely sensory event, pain is a response to tissue damage generated by a stimulus to a nociceptor. Patients, however, have vastly different responses to very similar pain-generating stimuli, suggesting that the patients' perception of pain cannot be caused solely by the intensity of the initial stimulus. Viewing pain in a perceptual framework allows a much greater recognition of the attentional, cognitive, affective, and social components to the pain experience. Psychotherapeutic approaches to patients in pain utilize a perceptual framework and will be the focus of this article.