Pain, although very common, is little understood. Worse still, accordingto Valerie Gray Hardcastle, both professional and lay definitions of pain arewrongheaded--with consequences for how pain and pain patients are treated, howpsychological disorders are understood, and how clinicians define the mind/bodyrelationship.Hardcastle offers a biologically based complex theory of painprocessing, inhibition, and sensation and then uses this theory to make severalarguments: (1) psychogenic pains do not exist; (2) a general lack of ...
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Pain, although very common, is little understood. Worse still, accordingto Valerie Gray Hardcastle, both professional and lay definitions of pain arewrongheaded--with consequences for how pain and pain patients are treated, howpsychological disorders are understood, and how clinicians define the mind/bodyrelationship.Hardcastle offers a biologically based complex theory of painprocessing, inhibition, and sensation and then uses this theory to make severalarguments: (1) psychogenic pains do not exist; (2) a general lack of knowledge aboutfundamental brain function prevents us from distinguishing between mental andphysical causes, although the distinction remains useful; (3) most pain talk shouldbe eliminated from both the folk and academic communities; and (4) such a biologicalapproach is useful generally for explaining disorders in pain processing. She showshow her analysis of pain can serve as a model for the analysis of otherpsychological disorders and suggests that her project be taken as a model for thephilosophical analysis of disorders in psychology, psychiatry, andneuroscience.
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