As a consultant psychologist in chronic pain management, I spend a lot of my time exploring and refining my ideas about what pain is. The reason I do this is because what we think pain is, has important consequences for how we all view pain and how as a society we treat it. Over the past few months, I have been very interested to read an articles tracing some of the factors which have led to the explosion in the use of opioid medication. This is at its most serious in the US, but certainly has echoes in the UK as well. You may know the old saying‚ the road to hell is paved with good intentions’. It came to my mind when I was…