The Non-Sense of Pain as a Sense - The Question of a Paradigm

Our daily experience shows that pain is strongly dependent on a specific situation and setting. There is a linguistic difference between very sensitive and painful assigning the latter something different than ‘pure’ sensation. Pain includes a social setting: children only mention pain if they need a specific social interaction (e.g. to vent frustration or draw attention). What makes a physiotherapeutic intervention just unpleasant and when is it painful? What if a Yoga position produces pain instead of toasty tension? Textbooks and authorities make us believe that pain has a strong correlation to the nervous system and indeed, the brain is necessary to become aware of it. This tradition started with the strict body-soul-dualism of Rene Descartes [1].