[Pain and disease as a transformation. An analysis from phenomenology and narration]

Pain and disease are life experiences difficult to be understood due to different reasons: they both fall under subjective limits; the sufferer feels imprisoned in his own pain and perceives a radical rupture within himself, and the sufferer feels he is alone to himself, unable to communicate. All these reasons explain that suffering is a transforming element in life. In modern scientific medicine, regarding the treatment of pain, the physiological approach is the preponderant one. Therefore, other intrinsic dimensions of the person, like the psychic, the spiritual, the relational or the identity are not viewed as detrimental. This is an oversimplification of the reality which implies that the person is treated as an object. This can be interpreted as an attempt to the dignity of the person. This paper is aimed to contribute to a broader understanding of pain and a better patient care. The author lays out the results of combining two different approaches of pain: the story that a writer invents about his own pain and the phenomenological analysis of Toombs and Carel. Four eidetic categories of pain are presented in this paper: the otherness, the metamorphosis and the identity crisis, the placement in the present time and the loneliness and loss of relations. As a conclusion, this paper gives a definition of disease that includes the previous four elements. Moreover, it proposes the ways of narration and expression as a complement to the pharmacological treatment in order to healing and care.