Pain remains a major public health challenge worldwide, contributing substantially to disability, reduced quality of life, and social and economic burden. While biomedical approaches have advanced understanding of nociception and pain-related pathology, there is increasing recognition that such perspectives alone are insufficient to account for the persistence, variability, and inequitable distribution of pain. Social, cultural, relational, and environmental factors play a central role in shaping how pain is experienced, interpreted, prevented, and managed. This Research Topic, Non-biomedical perspectives on pain and its prevention and management – Volume II, builds on this recognition by bringing together a diverse collection of contributions that explore pain beyond narrowly biomedical framings.

Volume I of this Research Topic demonstrated the breadth and legitimacy of non-biomedical approaches to pain, highlighting perspectives drawn from social sciences, humanities, systems thinking, and community-based practice. Volume II extends this work by further examining how such perspectives can inform prevention and management, particularly through attention to upstream conditions, relational processes, and care environments. Rather than proposing a single alternative model of pain, this Research Topic reflects the plurality of non-biomedical perspectives and their relevance to real-world pain contexts.

In methodological terms, the contributions to this Research Topic largely take an exploratory and interpretive approach, focusing on developing ideas and understanding experience rather than on testing specific interventions or outcomes. Many papers examine how pain is recognised, understood, and lived with in situations where standard biomedical measures on their own do not fully capture what matters to people. Others use analytic or evaluative approaches to place pain within wider social, relational, and systemic settings. Although a small number of studies focus on interventions or evaluations, these are situated within a broader non-biomedical perspective that emphasises care environments, communication, and lived experience. Overall, the Research Topic reflects a field that is concerned with learning, reflection, and opening up new ways of thinking about pain, rather than with providing final answers through testing alone. Future research can build on this work by bringing together experience-focused approaches with longer term, comparative, or mixed methods designs, and by paying greater attention to how non-biomedical perspectives are taken up, supported, or limited within different services, settings, and policy contexts, helping to connect new ways of understanding pain with changes in practice.