Pain is a common or predominant symptom of many diseases, such as headache from brain tumors, chest pain during a coronary attack, colic and abdominal pain due to gallstone disease, and cancer pain in patients with advanced cancer. Sometimes, the pain itself is a disease, taking the trigeminal neuralgia for instance. Pain not only brings discomfort to patients, but also affects human central nervous, circulatory, respiratory, endocrine, digestive, and autonomic nervous systems, even leading to serious and life-threatening symptoms. Clinically, acute and chronic pains are mostly treated with drugs, and the commonly used analgesics are non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (aspirin, paracetamol, etc.) and opioids (morphine, cocaine, etc.). However, non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs often induce gastrointestinal adverse reactions or liver and kidney injuries, and the long-term use of opioids can cause dependence. In addition, the prevalence of opioid abuse and addiction has greatly restricted its application in clinical practice. Acupuncture, massage, acupressure, and analgesic components in Chinese medicinals have demonstrated good pain-relieving effects without causing addiction and dependence. With the gradual recognition and acceptance of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) worldwide, its excellent performance in analgesia has attracted widespread attention. Clinicians and researchers around the world have been devoting themselves to the study of analgesia with TCM. The discovery of various active ingredients in Chinese medicinals and the study of effective therapies unique to TCM like acupuncture and moxibustion have provided powerful tools for pain management. TCM is helping countries around the world and the integration and mutual complementarity between TCM and western medicine has become a means of pain management gaining international attention in recent years.

Since 2014, Chinese Acupuncture & Moxibustion, Acupuncture Research, Liaoning Journal of Traditional Chinese Medicine, World Chinese Medicine, Chinese Pharmaceutical Journal, and Journal of Chinese Medicinal Materials have successively joined the Journal Translation Project (JTP, http://jtp.cnki.net/bilingual). As of 2020, 1 938 articles from these journals have been included in JTP and published in both Chinese and English, which has enhanced the international influence of these journals. To further promote the international dissemination of TCM culture and the related journals, and enable more readers to learn about the progress of research on pain management with TCM, the China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) collaborates with the editorial boards of these journals to constitute a panel of experts and select 34 excellent articles regarding pain management with TCM. These articles have been compiled into the book Pain (TCM) (English edition) as part of a series China’s Medicine Progress Series (English edition). The articles included are recommended by the editorial boards of journals in which they were originally published, and the content mainly covers the theoretical, mechanism, and clinical studies, fully demonstrating the unique therapies and excellent efficacy of TCM in pain management, with scientific methodological support and objective conclusions. The original articles were published in Chinese and this book is a compilation of English version of the selected articles.

As the editor-in-chief, I believe that this book will provide effective experience and methods from the TCM filed in China for pain treatment worldwide, as well as the scientific, practical, and up-to-date literature for those who are engaged in TCM all over the world, aiming to further enhance the international influence of TCM journals and contribute to the dissemination of TCM culture.

Editor-in-chief: ZHU Bing