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How many dimensions are needed to describe pain properly?

The International Association for the Study of Pain has defined pain as ‘an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage, or described in terms of such damage’. We all know this definition clearly pointing out two different dimensions of pain. But can we describe the whole pain experience with only two dimensions or do we need more? In this issue of the European Journal of Pain you will find the following article by Bustan et al. (2015) entitled: The authors tried to give an answer to this old question and assess the value of a third dimension. They evaluated pain-related suffering in addition to the classical pain assessment relying on intensity and unpleasantness as measures of the sensory-discriminative and motivational-affective pain components. In their sample of healthy volunteers, they showed that suffering constitutes an integral component of pain processing that is distinct from intensity and unpleasantness. In addition, they showed that tonic, rather than phasic stimulations, were eliciting more pain and suffering. The findings of this study are potentially important since they point out that the simple two-dimensional evaluation does not incorporate the whole experience of pain. According to the authors, the addition of a third visual analogue scale (VAS) to quantify pain-related suffering seems to be a simple way to better characterize this experience, at least in healthy volunteers.