[The idiopathic pain syndrome]

Acute pain is "the barking police-dog of our health". It represents an efficient system of information introducing or evoking a series of defensive mechanisms concerning acute illness, whereas the chronic ache is senseless, because it doesn't take over any protective functions; on the contrary, it burdens the total organism, especially the vegetativum and the psyche as well. Chronic pain very often renders independent, then it is no longer any symptom of a disease, but the disease itself: the idiopathic or unspecific syndrome of pain. Analyzing, for example, rheumatological aspects of a case, you can recognise that there exist continuous transitions from concrete local pain to diffuse indefinite psychalgia, whilst that gliding scale is more and more defined by psychic causes. Many aspects of cases imply a lot of such components. Obviously those syndromes of diseases are increasing where only pure psychosomatic facts exist, that is to say when soma is not the primary source but the scenery.