Exploring Pain Beyond Biomedicine: A New Edited Collection of International Research Papers

Pain remains one of the world's leading causes of disability, yet many important aspects of pain cannot be fully understood through biological mechanisms alone. People's experiences of pain are shaped by relationships, social circumstances, care environments, culture, and the wider contexts in which they live their lives. This research topic was developed to explore these broader influences and to showcase scholarship examining pain from a range of non-biomedical perspectives. 

The papers in Volume II revolve around five interconnected themes as described in our Editorial.

• Making pain visible, examines how pain is recognised, expressed, interpreted, and understood, particularly when conventional biomedical measures fail to capture what matters most to people.

• Pain as relational and socially mediated, explores how family members, carers, clinicians, and wider social networks influence pain experiences and outcomes. 

• Pain as patterned by place, population, and context, highlighting how social determinants, inequalities, living conditions, and communities shape the burden of pain. 

• Care design and the shaping of pain outcomes, examining how services, care environments, and organisational systems influence people's experiences of support and recovery. 

• Reflecting on non-biomedical perspectives themselves, considering their contribution to theory, research, practice, and policy. 

This volume builds on the foundations established by Volume I, which demonstrated the breadth and legitimacy of non-biomedical approaches to pain. Volume II extends that conversation by examining how these perspectives can inform prevention, management, service development, and future research. 

Taken together, the articles make a simple but important argument: if pain is shaped by people's lives, then understanding pain requires us to look beyond tissues and pathology alone. Understanding pain also requires attention to relationships, communities, environments, meanings, and the social conditions in which pain occurs. 

eBook: https://public-pages-files-2025.frontiersin.org/research-topics/66557/pdf

Research Topic: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/66557/non-biomedical-perspectives-on-pain-and-its-prevention-and-management-volume-ii/magazine

Editorial: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/pain-research/articles/10.3389/fpain.2026.1924013/full