Evangelical faith and chronic pain: modes of existence

We explore the case of two women who underwent conversion to Pentecostalism after the chronification of pain from two diseases, rheumatoid arthritis and fibromyalgia. Although the symptoms of these two conditions are similar, they have particular etiologies. Arthritis stems from an organic substrate. Fibromyalgia can bethought of from two perspectives: 1) it is presented as a problem of the nervous system that cannot modulate pain (biomedical prism); 2) evoking the dimension of existence from the dynamics of the unconscious and imposing on the patient a rupture in the world (phenomenological-psychoanalytical prism). Based on the second perspective, the aim is to show how faith, by substantiating a new relationship with the world in fibromyalgic cases, propitiated the recovery of a patient. The same faith, on the other hand, did not have the same "therapeutic effect" on the patient with rheumatoid arthritis, since her illness did not have as its motto the alienation from the world.