Word: patients
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...disaster." But when the pain alarm fails to shut off, it ceases to serve a useful function. "Uncontrolled pain," Basbaum notes, "is also a disaster." In fact, it can do serious harm. The acute pain that follows surgery can, for example, sometimes interfere with a patient's ability to breathe, as well as contribute to nausea and add to the strain on the heart. Chronic pain often leads to an endless cycle of anxiety, depression, loss of appetite, profound fatigue and sleeplessness, all of which make the pain seem worse. Says Neurologist Kathleen Foley, president of the American Pain...
...many cases of chronic pain, the patient has something material or psychological to gain from suffering. Seattle Psychologist Bill Fordyce cites the case of a woman who developed lower-back pain when her physician-husband retired, perhaps so that he would still have someone to treat. Studies have shown that individuals with a pending lawsuit seeking compensation for injuries rarely get better until the suit is settled...
Physicians have long known that if a patient is assured that he will recover and is treated with sympathy, his pain will often disappear. In the same way, a simple sugar pill, or placebo, prescribed in place of drugs, can have a curative effect. In fact, before the 20th century, when doctors relied on bleedings and all sorts of dubious nostrums, most of medicine was a type of placebo (Latin for "I will please...
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...
...letters pour into the Washington office of Judith Quattlebaum, 49. Again and again they tell a story that is all too familiar: the unremitting agony endured by a cancer patient, the frustrating sense of impotence felt by the family, and the apparent indifference of doctors seemingly more concerned about the latest advance in chemotherapy than about the comfort and dignity of their patient. Quattlebaum has been through it, having watched her grandmother slowly succumb to cancer. Seven years ago, she decided to act. Working out of her home, she organized the National Committee on the Treatment of Intractable Pain...