September is a month that signifies the end of summer, the beginning of fall, and for many, the return to routines and responsibilities. However, September also holds another important role—it’s Pain Awareness Month. This dedicated month seeks to raise awareness about the silent and often misunderstood epidemic of chronic pain.
Understanding Chronic Pain
Chronic pain is not just a physical sensation; it’s a life-altering experience that affects millions of people worldwide. It is typically defined as pain that persists for at least 12 weeks, beyond the expected time for healing. Chronic pain can result from various underlying conditions, including arthritis, fibromyalgia, neuropathy, and many others. It doesn’t discriminate by age, gender, or background and can strike anyone at any time.
Chronic pain affects more Americans adults than heart disease,cancer and diabetes combined ~ Stanford Institute of Medicine
Chronic Pain is Like a Car With Four Flat Tires
One of the greatest challenges with chronic pain is its invisibility. Unlike a visible injury or illness, chronic pain is often hidden beneath the surface, leaving those who suffer from it feeling isolated and misunderstood. This can lead to feelings of depression, anxiety, and a sense of hopelessness. Friends, family members, and even healthcare providers may not fully grasp the extent of the suffering endured by those with chronic pain.
Pain Awareness Month is a vital initiative aimed at addressing the challenges of those who suffer with chronic pain. It serves several essential purposes:
Education: It provides an opportunity to educate the public, healthcare providers, and policymakers about the complexities of chronic pain, its various causes, and the importance of effective pain management.
Empowerment: By raising awareness, Pain Awareness Month empowers individuals living with chronic pain to seek help, connect with support networks, and advocate for their needs.
Research and Advocacy: It supports research efforts to better understand and treat chronic pain and advocates for policies that improve access to pain management resources.
Living with pain
If you are living with chronic pain, or caring for a family member who is, listed below are a list of organizations, information and helpful resources.
Pain BC is a registered charity that is transforming the way chronic pain is understood and treated.
Making Sense of Pain Making is a self-management program designed for people with pain who experience marginalization and face barriers to accessing care.
American Chronic Pain Association The mission of the ACPA is to facilitate peer support and education for individuals with chronic pain and their families so that these individuals may live more fully in spite of their pain, and to raise awareness among the health care community, policymakers, and the public at large about issues of living with chronic pain.
The peak risk for misusing prescription pain relievers occurs in mid-adolescence, specifically about 16 years old and earlier than many experts thought, according to a new study by Michigan State University researchers.
The results, based on recent nationwide surveys of nearly 120,000 U.S. adolescents, suggest prevention programs may need to be introduced earlier, in childhood and early adolescence, said James C. Anthony of MSU’s Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics.
Recent trends show clinicians and public health professionals are prescribing more pain relievers, and research suggests an increased misuse of these drugs and increased rates of overdose deaths, said Anthony, who supervised the research of postdoctoral fellow Elizabeth Meier and graduate student Jonathan Troost.
“While much of the previous thinking was that misuse of these drugs emerged in the final year of high school and during the college-age years, we found that for adolescents the peak risk of starting to misuse these painkillers generally occurs earlier, not during the postsecondary school years,” Anthony said. “We suspect many physicians, other prescribing clinicians and public health professionals, will share our surprise in this finding.”
The study, supported by grants from the National Institute on Drug Abuse and MSU, was published today in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, a network publication of the Journal of the American Medical Association. [continue reading…]
Placebos reduce pain by creating an expectation of relief. Distraction—say, doing a puzzle—relieves it by keeping the brain busy. But do they use the same brain processes? Neuromaging suggests they do. When applying a placebo, scientists see activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. That’s the part of the brain that controls high-level cognitive functions like working memory and attention—which is what you use to do that distracting puzzle.
Now a new study challenges the theory that the placebo effect is a high-level cognitive function. The authors—Jason T. Buhle, Bradford L. Stevens, and Jonathan J. Friedman of Columbia University and Tor D. Wager of the University of Colorado Boulder—reduced pain in two ways – either by giving them a placebo, or a difficult memory task. lacebo. But when they put the two together, “the level of pain reduction that people experienced added up. There was no interference between them,” says Buhle. “That suggests they rely on separate mechanisms.” The findings, published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, could help clinicians maximize pain relief without drugs. [continue reading…]
Source: Sean Mackey, Stanford. Plos One, Journal Neuroscience: Archives of Internal Medicine
Melinda Beck’s Wall Street Journal article Rewiring the Brain to Ease Pain looks at how you think about pain can have a major impact on how it feels.
That’s the intriguing conclusion neuroscientists are reaching as scanning technologies let them see how the brain processes pain.
That’s also the principle behind many mind-body approaches to chronic pain that are proving surprisingly effective in clinical trials.
Some are as old as meditation, hypnosis and tai chi, while others are far more high tech. In studies at Stanford University’s Neuroscience and Pain Lab, subjects can watch their own brains react to pain in real-time and learn to control their response—much like building up a muscle. When subjects focused on something distracting instead of the pain, they had more activity in the higher-thinking parts of their brains. When they “re-evaluated” their pain emotionally—”Yes, my back hurts, but I won’t let that stop me”—they had more activity in the deep brain structures that process emotion. Either way, they were able to ease their own pain significantly, according to a study in the journal Anesthesiology last month.
