A German-Canadian research team is calling for a more comprehensive approach.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Dr. Sabrina Coninx from Ruhr-Universit\u00e4t Bochum and Dr. Peter Stilwell from McGill University, Canada, have investigated how philosophical approaches can be used to think in new ways about pain and its management. The researchers advocate not merely reducing chronic pain management to searching and treating underlying physical changes but instead adopting an approach that focuses on the person as a whole. Their work was published online in the journal \u201cSynthese\u201d on 15 April 2021.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It is not currently possible to treat chronic pain effectively in many cases. This has encouraged researchers from various disciplines to consider new approaches to pain and its management over recent years. \u201cPain research and clinical practice do not take place in a vacuum, but instead involve implicit assumptions regarding what pain is and how it can be treated,\u201d says Sabrina Coninx, research assistant at the Bochum research training group Situated Cognition. \u201cOur aim is to shed light on these assumptions and discover how we can think in new ways about pain and its management with the help of philosophical approaches.\u201d In their work, the authors develop a holistic, integrative and action-oriented approach.<\/p>\n\n\n\n