Should pain be on the health promotion agenda?

Abstract

Opportunities and liberties available to individuals allow them to function as full human beings and this should include freedom from persistent pain. Pain seems to be a downstream phenomenon which tells us that something has gone wrong. Health promoters, with their upstream perspective, should be concerned with pain. In this commentary we discuss conceptual issues concerning ‘health’ as the absence of pain, issues of health justice and issues of health education to raise awareness of pain. We suggest that pain should appear on the health promotion agenda and conclude that more awareness is needed in the epistemic health promotion community of physical pain as a factor in the distribution of health and well-being. We argue the need for more research on the extent to which pain follows the social gradient in the same way that other health inequalities do.