Psychological Approaches to the Evaluation of Chronic Pain Patients

Chronic pain - pain which persists for more than six months and resists all efforts at diagnosis and treatment - is said to be a serious public health problem. If we can accept the estimates supplied by the National Institute of Neurological, Communication Disorders and Stroke (1979) chronic pain afflicts as many as 75,000,000 Americans and costs the American economy as much as $40,000,000,000 per annum. One of the professional responses to the problem posed by chronic pain has been the establishment of multi-disciplinary pain clinics in which patients are evaluated and treated by consultants from a variety of disciplines, such as anaesthesia, neurology, neurosurgery, orthopaedics, psychiatry, psychology and social work (Bonica, 1976).