ABSTRACT
Chronic pain, impairment, and disability, rather than being actual entities, are constructs that can only be inferred in order to account for some form of behavior or phenomenon of interest. Chronic pain is a biopsychosocial concept based primarily on an experiential or subjective evaluation. Chronic pain is best viewed as a biopsychosocial process involving the often complex interaction among physical and psychosocial factors that make the experience of pain unique from one individual to the next. The construct of pain is frequently used to infer the presence of some biopsychosocial mechanisms that prompts patients’ complaints and inhibition of normal functioning and behavior. J. P. Robinson and R. J. Gatchel provided a comprehensive overview of the complexities involved in the assessment of disability of a patient with a painful condition. Disability agencies across different states will be quite different in the methods used.
