Place du psychiatre au sein d'une consultation collégiale d'évaluation et de traitement de la douleur chronique

Collegial consultation for evaluation and treatment of pain is intended to offer the patient an optimum attention to his suffering and an optimum help is based on a thorough psychosomatic approach, implemented by the specialists as a whole (pain specialist, neurologist, functional therapist and psychiatrist), who are present at the same time and in the same place. That interdisciplinarity3 offers the favourable conditions to listening to a complaint which concerns the body first, and is replaced in its biopsychosocial dimension; the steady flow of speech and of everybody's knowledge helps the patient to stand at the centre of a genuine exchange. Listening to and recognizing every aspect of his complaint, even the most implicit, constitute two indispensable prerequisites to the working out of a well-adapted project of medical care, whose success requires the active participation of the patient; the collegial framework of that consultation seems to maximize the chances to obtain the patient's support to the project, which is destined to become his.