Interdisciplinary multimodal pain therapy (IMST) is a complex treatment approach for the treatment of patients suffering from chronic pain. It is based on fundamental considerations from Bonica and Engels in the second half of the twentieth-century. Nowadays IMST seems to be a gold standard, especially in German pain facilities. Both the efficacy and the cost-effectiveness of interdisciplinary multimodal pain treatment programmes and their superiority over a unimodal therapy have been documented in a number of studies, reviews and meta-analyses, in particular in patients suffering from chronic low back pain. Nevertheless, there are still major shortcomings concerning an internationally consented definition of “multimodal/multidisciplinary treatment” and the quality of structures and processes, which have clearly been worked out by the German Pain Society (Deutsche Schmerzgesellschaft). Furthermore, there is still an ongoing debate on various treatment-related aspects such as treatment duration and outcome measurement.