title: Early screening of pain to prevent it from becoming intractable.
abstract: The pain of primary care patients remained, in a large number of instances, unexplained after careful physical examination. In the analysis of these instances a correlation was observed between anger and pain in the neck, between fear and abdominal pain and between sorrow and despair and low back pain. A simple test was developed in which the patients assess their own emotional situation. Good correlation makes subsequent manifestation of an organic cause very unlikely. This helps to avoid unnecessary referrals.
mesh_terms: D000005:Abdomen; D000328:Adult; D000786:Anger; D001416:Back Pain / Q000523:psychology; D002648:Child; D004644:Emotions; D005239:Fear; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009333:Neck; D010146:Pain / Q000523:psychology*; D010148:Intractable Pain / Q000517:prevention & control*; D012647:Self-Assessment