Pain

Most Western medicine is end-organ driven. That is, if you have back pain, the problem is considered to be in the back; a pelvic problem must originate in the pelvis. Indeed, Western medicine names these problems by the end organ; thus, we have “lower back pain” and “pelvic floor dysfunction.” This model is called physicalism. If a patient experiences a physical problem, the problem must have a physical origin at the site of the problem. Of course, surgery and other traditional Western approaches can definitely treat many physical problems, but practitioners also find problems for which no, or only partial, solutions are available. Pain that is nonanatomical in distribution, for which there is no recent history of trauma, no evidence of a peripheral causative lesion ...