Abstract
Pain is an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience that is primarily associated with actual or potential tissue damage and requires prompt identification of its underlying cause and appropriate treatment. Pain is a universal human experience and is regarded as one of the fundamental signs of life. To date, only a limited number of medical specialties have focused on pain management, and the approaches employed have often lacked effectiveness and standardization, particularly in the management of chronic pain. Nevertheless, increasing attention has been directed toward pain management over time. Despite this progress, pain management and treatment, especially for chronic pain, remain fragmented, inconsistent, and insufficiently evidence-based across many medical disciplines, with their importance still underestimated. Therefore, there is a need for multidisciplinary consensus as well as a practical tool that can be broadly applied to pain management across various disease conditions. The **Recognise–Assess–Treatment (RAT)** approach has been proposed as a simple and effective framework for multidisciplinary pain management. Within this model, pain is classified as acute or chronic, cancer-related or non-cancer-related, and nociceptive or neuropathic, thereby facilitating the selection of the most appropriate treatment strategy.
