ABSTRACT
INTRODUCTION Clinical practitioners commonly see patients with pain and other somatic symptoms that they cannot adequately explain on the basis of the degree of damage or inflammation noted in peripheral tissues. In fact, this may be among the most common predicament that individuals seek medical attention for (1). Typically, an evaluation is performed looking for a “cause” for the pain. If none is found, these individuals are often given a diagnostic label that merely connotes that the patient has chronic pain in a region of the body, without an underlying mechanistic cause [e.g., chronic low back pain, headache, temporomandibular disorder (TMD), etc.]. In other cases, the label given alludes to an underlying mechanism that may or may not be responsible for the individual’s pain (e.g., “facet syndrome”).
