Academic pain research is dominated by a biomedical paradigm, grounded in the cure of illness and disease, that has produced vast amounts of research data focussing on tissue rather than living experience. This has failed to provide a complete understanding of pain, its prevention, treatment, or management. The biopsychosocial model is widely used in clinical practice and research as the primary framework for understanding health, disease, and healthcare, including pain, although critiques highlight both conceptual and practical limitations associated with its application. Pain practice is focused on resolving pain at an individual level (patient-centred pain management) rather than tackling factors influencing pain at societal level (community-centred) or environmental level (ecologically-centred) solutions. A treatment-prevalence paradox for chronic pain suggests the need for a paradigm shift.

In general, academic health-related pain literature lacks research and scholarship from non-biomedical disciplines. We are interested in deepening an understanding of the living experiences of pain in the modern era through the lens of evolutionary-mismatch and socio-ecological frameworks. Developing the concept of the painogenic environment, informed by research and scholarship from non-biomedical disciplines, may provide opportunities to shift perspectives and open-up new avenues for exploration, including strategies to reduce the burden of pain on society.

The discipline of pain, like so many other disciplines, focuses on specialty knowledge that favours depth and detail over breadth and context, fragmenting knowledge and creating vast amounts of information that lacks context, i.e., data rich but meaning poor. We seek to grow a community of scholars, researchers, and practitioners with an interest in non-biomedical perspectives to develop a deeper understanding of the complex socio-ecological milieu in which individuals, communities and populations view and experience pain. We seek to build on the success of our previous Research Topic that included contributions about the language of pain, salutogenesis, art, temporality, psychosocial perspectives, and emotional memory, encapsulated in Johnson and Woodall’s socioecological model of pain. The goal of volume two is to curate contributions about insidious painogenic forces within the complex socio-ecological milieu of the modern world that influence the stickiness of pain (i.e., intractable pain), to catalyse scholarly conversation about the interplay between individuals, society, and ecosystems. In doing so, we hope to improve and understanding of pain and inform future healthcare research, practice, and policy.