ABSTRACT
This chapter explains about the meaning and impact of the illness experience in patients with chronic pain, and suggests that some pathways for getting access to patient narratives. In clinical work, illness experience may differ from, or even contradict, the physician’s biomedical assumptions and images that shape his or her agenda and approach. The patient’s own insight into her illness experience can be expressed as an illness story. The patient-centered clinical method encourages the physician to try to enter the patient’s world, and see the illness through the patient’s eyes. Social insurance rules are also mediating the dismissal of subjective symptoms where objective findings cannot be identified by the physician. The physician’s awareness may be enhanced by realizing how illness perceptions and behavior in men and women are shaped in cultural and social moulds. The consequences of pain on identity appear to be closely connected to gender roles or even stereotypes, and these in turn are related to social class.
