Since pain, as a phenomenon, is accessible only to the person who experiences it (which represents an obstacle to the objective categorization in the linguistic medium), when patients want to make it available to their interlocutors, they describe it with very detailed and elaborate metaphor scenarios, most often those relating to a form of body damage. Using such embodied metonymic and metaphorical definitions, they provide an adequate imaginative simulation of their subjective experience for their recipients. Using theoretical and methodological instruments of cognitive linguistics, we have analysed authentic pain descriptors (which have become part of the standardized diagnostic vocabulary), as well as less direct ways of describing pain. In order to reconstruct the semantic, but also the pragmatic motivation of the metaphorical (and metonymic) linguistic expressions, we have cautiously approached the generalization from the actual linguistic material to conceptual structures and, ultimately, to an integral cognitive model of pain. On the other hand, we have analysed and interpreted creative and innovative modifications in individual metaphorical realizations, motivated by actual communicative situations, as well as metaphorical usages found in the field of the media. Our results show, in a very consistent manner, a discrepancy between the folk model of pain as a phenomenologically unique and complete experience (testified as such in patients’ spontaneous narratives) and the expert model of pain, which is founded on contemporary interdisciplinary scientific insights and which considers pain as a very complex phenomenon consisting of at least four distinct aspects that can/should be separately approached. It is precisely in their reconciliation, as well as in education and the elimination of misconceptions abundant in the universally accepted folk model of pain, that we see a possible valuable contribution to a better understanding of pain, which could bring about very concrete benefits, such as improving the existing questionnaires and self-assessment pain scales, but also better and more effective communication between patients and health professionals in general.