Functional pain: time for a new name

PainSci summary of Schechter 2014?This page is one of thousands in the PainScience.com bibliography. It is not a general article: it is focused on a single scientific paper, and it may provide only just enough context for the summary to make sense. Links to other papers and more general information are provided at the bottom of the page, as often as possible. ★★★★★?5-star ratings are for sentinel studies, excellent experiments with meaningful results. Ratings are a highly subjective opinion, and subject to revision at any time. If you think this paper has been incorrectly rated, please let me know.

Schecter explains several problems with the term “functional pain disorder,” and particularly highlights its strong and ridiculous connotation of a psychological problem in modern use. He proposes a much tidier and more description: “primary pain disorder.”

Therefore, a new neutral name is proposed for this category, primary pain disorders. This term arises from the headache field, where headaches are categorized as primary (the head pain itself is the central problem) or secondary (the headache is due to other factors such as increased intracranial pressure or infection, for example). The term primary pain disorder implies that the pain itself is the disease.

related content

These two articles on PainScience.com cite Schechter 2014 as a source:

• Complete Guide to Headaches — Detailed, readable, science-based self-help for tension headaches and other common musculoskeletal headaches
• The 3 Basic Types of Pain — Nociceptive, neuropathic, and “other” (and then some more)

This page is part of the PainScience BIBLIOGRAPHY, which contains plain language summaries of thousands of scientific papers & others sources. It’s like a highly specialized blog. A few highlights:

• Effectiveness of customised foot orthoses for Achilles tendinopathy: a randomised controlled trial. Munteanu 2015 Br J Sports Med.
• A Bayesian model-averaged meta-analysis of the power pose effect with informed and default priors: the case of felt power. Gronau 2017 Comprehensive Results in Social Psychology.
• The neck and headaches. Bogduk 2014 Neurol Clin.
• Agreement of self-reported items and clinically assessed nerve root involvement (or sciatica) in a primary care setting. Konstantinou 2012 Eur Spine J.
• Effect of NSAIDs on Recovery From Acute Skeletal Muscle Injury: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis. Morelli 2017 Am J Sports Med.