Understanding and dealing with pain-related suffering is a big challenge in healthcare and research. But there’s no agreement on exactly what it means, and it’s often not clearly defined in studies. Here, we did three things: (1) looked at how pain-related suffering is understood in existing research, (2) made our own definition and framework, and (3) checked our results using machine learning. We found 111 articles in our search and used a new method to analyze them. From this, we defined pain-related suffering as a very negative, complex experience when someone feels their well-being is threatened. We also created a framework with 8 dimensions to understand it better: social, physical, personal, spiritual, existential, cultural, cognitive, and affective. Our findings show that pain-related suffering is different from but closely connected to pain itself. This analysis gives direction for more research in this area. Read full artice>>