Der Schmerz
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From the point of view of healthcare policies, improvement in pain care has been required for years; however, there is a great discrepancy between the current need for pain care and the actual provision by healthcare services. This article seeks to demonstrate that while healthcare policies are one of the critical factors involved, a variety of conceptual, diagnostic and therapeutic causes should also be taken into account. Firstly, considering that pain care is primarily concerned with the suffering of pain by patients, the focus lies with their conscious experience in order to define the patients' understanding of pain. Additionally, in this article current biomedical and psychosocial comprehension concerning chronic pain will be illustrated and why it is necessary to broaden our horizons in order to do justice to patients with chronic pain.
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Methodological reflections on pain research and pain therapy focussing on addiction risks are addressed in this article. Starting from the incompleteness of objectification of the purely subjectively fully understandable phenomena of pain and addiction, the relevance of a comprehensive general psychology is underlined. It is shown that that reduction of pain and addiction to a mainly focally arguing neurobiology is only possible if both disciplines have a systemic concept of pain and addiction. With this aim, parallelized conceptual network models are presented.