Title Details

From time to time, we all feel pain. One bad night’s sleep and we wake up with a stiff neck that may annoy us for days. A tenser period at work and that occasional headache may turn into a chronic one. “When these pains persist for more than three consecutive months, a ‘persistent pain syndrome’ is installed. And when there is no specific physical factor behind it, we diagnose it as a ‘functional’ painful syndrome”- – explains rheumatologist Pedro Ming Azevedo, author of 'The Science of Pain: about fibromyalgia and other pain syndromes'.

According to the doctor, the vast majority of us will eventually have a condition that may fit into one of these diagnoses during difficult periods of our lives. The birth of a child, job or family instabilities are classic triggering events, and they may help us start to understand what we are talking about: pain can be seen as a “natural” product of an “overload” created by the need to adapt to the demands of life. “However”, Azevedo explains, “at least 10% of the population feels some kind of functional pain that may persist after the end of such periods of greater stress, that may even start independently of them, or which are triggered by trivial, everyday events. When the pain is generalized, and not localized, it is called fibromyalgia.”