A therapeutic milieu for chronic pain patients.

Traditional means of treating chronic pain have been unsuccessful in a discouraging number of cases. Pain centers have appeared within the last few years, offering a more comprehensive view of the whole pain problem. Pain centers address pain as a multifaceted event with social, economic, physiological, and psychological representations. In addition, the pain center constructs an atmosphere that provides every opportunity for reduction of pain, while minimizing those factors that tend to encourage its expression. Such a venture calls for a multidisciplinary approach; it further demands a rather sophisticated grasp of numerous factors which do not necessarily lend themselves to discussion with a single vocabulary. This paper will attempt to describe a number of conceptual models of chronic pain and to demonstrate how each of these models is addressed therapeutically in a multidisciplinary pain center millieu.