Abstract
Pain is an experience consistent with tissue damage, sometimes expressed by words, by voice heritage of our phylogenetic predecessors, such as howling, inarticulate screaming, or manifestation of pain in the expressions of facial and skeletal muscles. Verbal and non-verbal expressions of pain are part of social communication.
Pain can be also caused by empathy with the suffering person. The base of the modern view on the biopsychological aspect of pain was provided by the Gate Control Theory (Melzack and Wall, 1965).
This theory explained the transfer of information on tissue damage in the neural (electro-physiological) code. This process - nociception - is a feedback one.
Processes in the CNS retroactively regulate neural information from the periphery to the CNS. The conversion ("translation") of neural (electro-physiological) code into mental process - pain - this theory does not explains.
Information about tissue damage in the neural code is processed ("translated") to the mental level in the CNS. Pain induces other subjective processes, affective and cognitive.
These processes run "between" biological (body) processes on the one side, and social and other external processes on the other side. Pain and related mental processes take place in this area.
But only some mental processes pass through "the gait of consciousness" - not everything is "convenient to know". Modern viewpoint on processes between the body and the mind gives artificial intelligence; traditional solutions give religion and philosophy.
Modern theories combine, in some extent, both viewpoints too. In 1979, McCarthy formulated the conditions under which can mental and other information processes run on any HW, even without HW.
Mental, spiritual or virtual processes such can exist as analogues processes of other intelligent beings (intelligent agents). The psychology of chronic pain has long persisted in the unilateral psychological interpretation of chronic pain, such as learned pain behavior, masochism, or hysterical conversion.
Pain as a biopsychosocial problem on the border of biological and social processes has been step by step clinically accepted, and fully addressed by interdisciplinary pain centers. The limits of a biopsychosociospiritual approach to pain depend on the state of knowledge, on ability and willingness to use it, as well as on economical, social and political conditions.
The building of bio-psycho-social-spiritual theory, research and clinic is "the newer-ending process". There is a historically conditioned boundary between disciplines, preferring the biomedical aspect even where psychological, social, and economic problems dominate.
Research that is of interest to industrial concerns (pharmacy, medical electronics) is financially supported. Partial information is accumulated.
Theories that would be arranged this information are almost missing.