When medications are first developed, they are usually developed to treat a specific issue. Once the medication is approved for use for that issue, doctors and researchers sometimes notice that other problems may improve when they prescribe the medication to their patients.

Somatic pain isn't really pain that is in your head, although that is an easy way to look at it. Somatic pain is a process of a mental or emotional feeling or stress that becomes a physical feeling. The feeling is very real to the person and the brain is interpreting it as very real.

Without a thorough examination, it wouldn't be possible to say if your nausea is physical or "in your head," but either way, that doesn't mean that your nausea isn't real. Stress and other factors can make our body believe that it is ill or in pain; it's part of the overall reaction.

Living with chronic pain can be difficult, particularly if you don't know the cause. You don't say what types of doctors you've seen but it may be worth your while to see a pain specialist. Most pain specialists are anesthesiologists, doctors who specialize in relieving pain.

Pain is a very individual experience and while some people are able to cope with intense pain, others have difficulty coping with what some may consider to be mild pain. Add to this that pain is not always caused by a specific thing, such as a broken bone, a cut in the skin, or a mass in the body and you will see that pain is very complex.

Somatisation (also spelled somatization) is the process of a mental or emotional feeling or stress becoming a physical feeling. Researchers often wonder about somatisation and psychosomatic behavior because it's a puzzling part of the human body and mind. Not only is it puzzling, it's very common. Many people experience somatisation at some point, with fatigue and nausea for example.

Somatization occurs when you feel something physical as a result of an emotional or stressful feeling, but some doctors feel that the term is being used too much and not appropriately. In fact, many doctors believe that the term does not belong in medical terminology.

That's a good and very valid question. Pain is a difficult thing to measure. There's no lab test that can put it into an absolute number like a white blood cell count. Yet with 50 million chronic pain sufferers in the United States alone, there's got to be a better way to measure pain than the visual analog scale (VAS). Using this scale, patients assign a number from zero to 10 to rate their pain (zero is no pain, 10 is the worst pain).

Pain is a very difficult thing to measure. There's no lab test that can put it into an absolute number like a white blood cell count. Yet with 50 million chronic pain sufferers in the United States alone, there's got to be a better way to measure pain than the visual analog scale (VAS). Using this scale, patients assign a number from zero to 10 to rate their pain (zero is no pain, 10 is the worst pain).

Very simply, nonneuropathic pain is pain that is NOT coming from damaged or irritated nerves. Neuropathic pain -- neuro for nerve and pathic suggest something IS pathologic or wrong with the nerve.