Papers of the Week

Psychological treatments for chronic pain have helped many people around the world. They are among the most researched and best evidenced treatments a person can receive when they have persistent, disabling, and distressing pain. At the same time improvements in the effectiveness of these treatment appear to be at a standstill. This may be due to an inherent lack of generalizability from aggregated group data to the individual, limited utility of our current schemes for categorizing people with pain conditions, faced with their inherent heterogeneity, our relatively course categories of treatment types and focus on treatment packages rather than individual methods, and our current failures to find adequate predictors of outcome, or to assign people their best-suited treatment methods, based on group data. In this review it is argued that the development and examination of truly personalized treatment is a next logical step to create progress, and improve the results people achieve.