Word: paines
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...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...
...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 care...
Doctors who specialize in managing pain say this need not be so. Perhaps the biggest reason so many patients suffer more than they should is the tendency among doctors and patients alike to see pain as a mere sideshow--a vexing side effect of arthritis, a herniated disc, cancer or trauma--rather than what it is: a serious and consequential health issue in its own right. A long-suffering Michigan physician and 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...
...second big reason for the widespread failure to find adequate 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...