Clarifying the Definition of Pain

I recently was at a meeting on designing a model of pain care delivery. The meeting was filled with clinical and operational experts. In the course of the meeting, one healthcare provider made the case that high quality pain care starts with “finding the pain generator.” By this phrase, he meant that the delivery system should support the use of scans and diagnostic injections to identify the orthopedic structure(s) responsible for any given patient’s pain. From there, he insisted that a foundation could be laid for establishing successful treatment plans to resolve the identified pain generator, presumably through interventional and/or surgical means.

Once having made his case, another provider spoke up and asked how he’d square the care delivery model he proposed with the fact that so-called “pain generators” lack any significant correlation with pain. She cited common evidence showing that findings on MRI scans do not correlate with pain, and that diagnostic injections lack reliability and validity (cf., Vagaska, et., 2019; Kreiner, et al., 2020). In so doing, she used science to challenge the whole foundation on which the previous speaker had advocated for his model of pain care delivery. 

In reaction, it was apparent that the original speaker didn’t quite know how to respond. The challenge seemed to catch him by surprise. He seemed unaware of the common research findings she referenced.