Word: chronical
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Chronic pain is a thief. It breaks into your body and robs you blind. With lightning fingers, it can take away your livelihood, your marriage, your friends, your favorite pastimes and big chunks of your personality. Left unapprehended, it will steal your days and your nights until the world has collapsed into a cramped cell of suffering...
...plenty of company in her misery. Approximately 1 in 6 Americans suffers from chronic or recurrent pain. For many, especially the millions who suffer from inflammatory diseases like arthritis or from chronic back pain, the withdrawal of Vioxx from the market last September and the serious questions raised about the safety of the entire class of COX-2 inhibitor drugs--at last week's Food and Drug Administration (FDA) hearings and in the latest issue of the New England Journal of Medicine--represent yet another setback in the long, frustrating search for relief. "I just loved Vioxx. It was magic...
...sure. "I definitely feel at the mercy of the pharmaceutical companies and the FDA," she says. "It's terrible that they've scared people so much. All drugs have side effects, and some probably have much worse risks than Vioxx." Studies suggest that roughly half of Americans with chronic or recurrent pain simply do not find a good solution, and the news out of the hearings is not going to make their choices any easier. In fact, chronic pain is a leading cause of lost workdays. It costs the nation an estimated $100 billion in lost productivity and increased health...
...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...