[The medical perspective towards chronic pain: biomedical model and clinical practice].

This study aimed to shed light on the meanings ascribed to chronic pain in medical discourse and clinical practice in two Pain Clinics located in University hospitals in Salvador (Bahia) and São Paulo, Brazil. An ethnographic approach used participant observation and semi-structuralized interviews with attending and managing physicians. Data analysis drew on the clinical models developed by Byron Good and the medical rationalities project formulated by Madel Luz. The meanings emerging from the study were the recognition of chronic pain by biomedicine as a disease rather than a symptom, its invisibility to physicians, and its non-communicability and inevitability. The informants suggested the need for valorization of the human encounter in the clinic, exercise of understanding as opposed to suspicion, and negotiation of sustainable therapeutic projects.