ABSTRACT
Pain — The Fifth Vital Sign? Pain is a natural phenomenon of all humankind. Yet, until recently, it has been a sadly neglected field of behavior and medicine. In 1958, when I started to study human pain behavior, I was amazed to find how little knowledge of pain and its treatment was available. At that time, most clinicians believed that “real” pain had an underlying physical or physiological basis. Therefore, treating this underlying cause by appropriate therapeutic methods would cure or at least control the basic problem and the patient’s pain would be alleviated. Should the patient continue to complain of pain following “successful” treatment, except for malignancies, the patient was often told “it is all in your head” — or worse he would be called a malingerer. Actually, this may still occur occasionally.
