Effectiveness of an interdisciplinary pain management program for the treatment of chronic pelvic pain.

Chronic pelvic pain has rarely been discussed in the pain management literature, although it is extremely common in general gynecological practice and often refractory to traditional medical and surgical therapy. A chronic pelvic pain program was developed to offer an alternative treatment approach for women for whom standard gynecological procedures were inappropriate or unsuccessful. Sixteen subjects completed the full 6-8 week interdisciplinary program, which included both somatic and behavioral therapies.

The dimensions of pain: a multidimensional scaling comparison of cancer patients and healthy volunteers.

This paper presents a new approach to the measurement and understanding of clinical pain. A multidimensional scaling (MDS) procedure was used to analyze pairwise similarity judgments made to 9 pain descriptors by 24 cancer pain patients and 24 healthy volunteers. The question was whether the dimensions of the global pain space differed between the 2 groups.