ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at how biopsychosocial approaches have developed and improved the understanding of patient's pain and illness. Biopsychosocial understandings of pain and illness have informed patients approach to non-cardiac chest pain (NCCP). Traditionally, pain was seen to conform to a purely biomedical model of disease underpinned by the philosophy of dualism: mind and body functioning as separate entities. In 1977, George Engel proposed a radically different approach to medicine based on evidence that psychosocial factors play a critical role in the experience of pain and illness. Pain is transmitted by sensory nerves that carry impulses from every peripheral organ in the body to the central nervous system. Chronic pain can be understood as the activation of the body's pain alarm system when there is no acute threat or injury. The gate control theory emphasizes the interaction between cognitive, affective and sensory influences in pain.
