ABSTRACT
Chronic pain, like the phantom limb, is a neurologically and psychologically controversial subject area. Chronic pain, such as fibromyalgia, raises speculations into the motivating factors of the subject’s complaints, and presents many environmental—psychological, physical, cultural, and developmental—complications for aetiology and diagnoses. Chronic pain may be associated with a variety of circumstances, illnesses, and disabilities such as phantom limb syndrome, cancer and arthritis. Chronic pain has sometimes been diagnosed as a hysterical symptom of a conversion disorder. Chronic pain becomes a disease or a disorder when the value of learning and warning produced from acute pain is lost. Research evidences that chronic pain is associated with prolonged neuroplastic changes in nociceptive processes in the central nervous system. The duality of the existence of pain is necessary in discussing chronic pain syndrome as it was when discussing the phantom limb syndrome.
