How mind-body medicine is changing the future of pain treatment

For decades, chronic pain treatment has often centered on the painful body part.

Medication, injections, physical therapy and surgery can all have important roles, particularly when a specific pathology requires treatment. Yet persistent pain frequently continues even when the original injury has healed or when no single structural abnormality can adequately explain the severity of symptoms.

This has encouraged a broader clinical question of what else influences pain? Modern pain science increasingly recognizes that biological, psychological and social processes shape pain.