Word: chronic
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...mother of three, who asks that her name not be used, knows this both as a doctor and as a patient whose life has been compromised by severe neck pain stemming from a 1999 car accident. "I know all too well how most doctors really feel about people with chronic pain who don't get better: disdainful and contemptuous," she says. "There is a real sense of the patient as a failure and a weak person who can't pull him- or herself together and cope...
...pain relief is that most of us seek it entirely in a pill bottle--or two or three. The quest for pharmaceutical salvation is misguided to begin with, say doctors at the nation's most sophisticated pain-management centers. The lesson they have to teach us all is that chronic pain must be attacked on many fronts. Drugs are important, but they are just one weapon in the arsenal...
...Studies have shown that patients who use a multidisciplinary program do better than patients who take medications only," says Dr. Pamela Palmer, medical director of the pain-management center at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). "The anxiety, the depression, the hopelessness that come with chronic pain really all have to be addressed"--as do the loss of mobility, hypersensitivity to touch and other effects that can destroy the quality of life. "It's not as if you can just take an anti-inflammatory drug and all those problems go away." To pain specialists like Palmer, the hand wringing...
WHAT CAUSES CHRONIC PAIN...
...With chronic pain, however, the alarm continues to shriek uselessly long after the physical danger has passed. Somewhere along the line--maybe near the initial injury, maybe in the spinal cord or brain--the alarm system has broken down. What researchers have only recently come to understand is that prolonged exposure to this screaming siren actually does its own damage. "Pain causes a fundamental rewiring of the nervous system," says Dr. Sean Mackey, director of research at Stanford University's Pain Management Center. "Each time we feel pain, there are changes that occur that tend to amplify our experience...