To Help Doctors and Patients, Researchers Are Developing a ‘Vocabulary of Pain’

From the 26 July 2011 Science Daily article

All over the world, patients with chronic pain struggle to express how they feel to the doctors and health-care providers who are trying to understand and treat them.

Now, a University at Buffalo psychiatrist is attempting to help patients suffering from chronic pain and their doctors by drawing on ontology, the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature of being or existence.

The research will be discussed during a tutorial he will give at the International Conference on Biomedical Ontology, sponsored by UB, that will be held in Buffalo July 26-30.

“Pain research is very difficult because nothing allows the physician to see the patient’s pain directly,” says Werner Ceusters, MD, professor of psychiatry in UB’s School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, and principal investigator on a new National Institutes of Health grant, An Ontology for Pain and Related Disability, Mental Health and Quality of Life.

“The patient has to describe what he or she is feeling.”

Read the article

Related articles

• What Doctors don’t know about pain (thehandiestone.typepad.com)
• Well: Giving Chronic Pain a Medical Platform of Its Own (well.blogs.nytimes.com)