FROM PAIN TO DIAGNOSIS

Key words: Clinical practice, Pain symptom, Epidemiology, Causeless pain

On the basis of the “unforgettable cases” drawn from personal experience, of the mistakes easily made in clinical practice, and especially of specific Literature mostly taken from the main consulting texts, the author tries to synthesize the use of the symptom pain for the diagnosis, the epidemiology of the main causes of pain in different ages, for the possible differentiation between causeless pain and pain deriving from organic pathology, for the tricks that the clinic of the pain may present and for the “small red flags” that need to alarm us before an apparently trivial pain.