Background: Every professional segment has its own typical forms of stress, which for members result in patterns of bodily conception and interpretation of pain. The way individuals cope with these typical forms of pain reflects their social identity, social status and group membership. In this study pain was investigated from a sociological perspective as a medium contributing to socialization processes in stress collectives.
Objectives: Cultural conceptions of headache and migraine were investigated in members of blue collar occupations, in service professions and patients in specialized medical pain care.
Materials and methods: In this study 49 qualitative biographical interviews were conducted with patients suffering from headache and migraine. The study population included persons from the general outpatient population and patients recruited from specialized inpatient pain clinics.
Results: Members of blue collar occupations with specific body-oriented, mechanical stress patterns and dominant masculine attitudes, perceived headache and migraine as atypical deviations, which are contextualized as body pain. Professionals in the service sector with specific communicative-emotional work patterns perceived headache and migraine as typical and accepted deviations. Both pain conceptions represent dominant body norms and social commitments in each group; however, in specialized pain care these everyday concepts are transformed by increasing expert knowledge resulting in medicalized life styles and in identity conceptions conforming to the medical imperative.
Conclusion: The success of specialized treatment of headache depends to a certain extent on the ability of patients to impose a medically regulated life style on their significant others; however, this can conflict with the demands of everyday life.
Keywords: Interviews; Medical sociology; Migraine disorders; Pain threshold; Social environment.