Word: paines
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Physical therapies are helpful not only in relieving pain, but in helping patients get on with their lives despite it. Such treatments, including exercise, whirlpool and massage, are particularly useful for back pain, which is often compounded by muscular weakness. Before Maureen Brennan, 37, of Helena, Mont., arrived at the Seattle pain clinic for treatment of her back problem, she was confined to a wheelchair and was spending $180 a week on narcotics, sleeping pills and antidepressants. An accident four years earlier had ruptured five discs in her spine. Seven operations had failed to relieve the pain, and her weight...
Hypnosis, biofeedback and TENS stimulation, once considered "fringe" methods of treatment, have earned respectable places in the pain clinic arsenal. Acupuncture, which tends to give only temporary analgesia, has a smaller following. According to Bonica, TENS provides significant short-term relief for 65% to 80% of patients and long-term relief for 30% to 35%. The electrical stimulating devices are widely available at costs ranging from $60 to $400. Biofeedback...
...which electronic devices are used to teach patients to relieve tension, has proved helpful for a number of ailments, including one of the most perplexing problems in medicine: phantom limb pain, the often agonizing sensations that amputees "feel" in missing limbs. Psychophysiologist Richard Sherman, of Dwight David Eisenhower Army Medical Center in Fort Gordon, Ga., has found that the pain, which afflicts about 80% of amputees at one time or another, is sometimes due to muscle spasms in the stump. When Sherman teaches patients to relax the affected muscles through biofeedback training, the sensations in the phantom limb usually disappear...
...cancer patients, more drastic measures are often needed. According to Kathleen Foley, chief of the pain service at Sloan-Kettering, only about one-third of cancer patients suffer severe pain. With these, the tumor is the cause in 65% of patients, either because it impinges on nerves or because it releases chemicals that affect the nervous system. An additional 30% have pain resulting from the treatment (for example, chemotherapy). Cancer of the pancreas and of bones can be particularly painful because of the sensitive nerves in or near these organs. In the vast majority of cases, cancer pain...
Surgery is the last recourse of the pain patient. "I spend an awful lot of my time telling people not to have it," says Neurosurgeon Poletti of Massachusetts General Hospital. Although operations to destroy nerves can provide immediate relief, the benefits rarely last more than six months to a year and may be followed by intense, burning pain that is worse than the original complaint. Surgery is often reserved for terminal-cancer patients. For such patients, neurosurgeons have devised delicate operations to cut nerves causing local pain, and even to sever nerve tracts in the spinal cord and brain...