Research Grants - Migraine Research Foundation
The Migraine Research Foundation (MRF) and the Association of Migraine Disorders (AMD) announce the opening of a joint Request for Proposals for migraine research grants. MRF is committed to discovering the causes, improving the treatments, and finding a cure, and AMD stimulates increased research specifically in the area of migraine disorders. We are looking for projects that will help sufferers by advancing our ability to understand and treat migraine. As a result, we provide seed money grants for transformational projects that will lead to better treatment and quality of life for sufferers of migraine and migraine disor...
Source: Psychology of Pain - May 11, 2016 Category: Anesthesiology Source Type: blogs
What Does Genetics Tell Us About Chronic Pain? - Relief: Pain Research News, Insights And Ideas
When the pain comes, Alina Delp retreats to air conditioning as soon as possible. What begins to feel like a mild sunburn will, if left unattended, turn into a raging, burning pain.
"It's this turbulent, violent sensation that feels electric and stinging," Delp says, describing the pain at its worst. "I've run out of the building screaming like a lunatic before because it's been so bad."
Delp has erythromelalgia, a rare condition in which a person's body (typically the feet and the hands, though Delp experiences pain all over) reacts to mild warmth as though it is on fire. Mild exertio...
Source: Psychology of Pain - May 10, 2016 Category: Anesthesiology Source Type: blogs
' You want a description of hell?' OxyContin's 12-hour problem - Los Angeles Times
The drugmaker Purdue Pharma launched OxyContin two decades ago with a bold marketing claim: One dose relieves pain for 12 hours, more than twice as long as generic medications. < br > < br > Patients would no longer have to wake up in the middle of the night to take their pills, Purdue told doctors. One OxyContin tablet in the morning and one before bed would provide & quot;smooth and sustained pain control all day and all night. & quot; < br > < br > On the strength of that promise, OxyContin became America & #39;s bestselling painkiller, and Purdue reaped $31 billion in revenue. < br > < br > But OxyContin & #39;s stunni...
Source: Psychology of Pain - May 10, 2016 Category: Anesthesiology Source Type: blogs
'You want a description of hell?' OxyContin's 12-hour problem - Los Angeles Times
The drugmaker Purdue Pharma launched OxyContin two decades ago with a bold marketing claim: One dose relieves pain for 12 hours, more than twice as long as generic medications.
Patients would no longer have to wake up in the middle of the night to take their pills, Purdue told doctors. One OxyContin tablet in the morning and one before bed would provide "smooth and sustained pain control all day and all night."
On the strength of that promise, OxyContin became America's bestselling painkiller, and Purdue reaped $31 billion in revenue.
But OxyContin's stunning success masked a fundamental problem: The d...
Source: Psychology of Pain - May 10, 2016 Category: Anesthesiology Source Type: blogs
Scientists Have Been Using a Flawed Method to Diagnose Pain - Gizmodo
For many years, neuroscientists believed they had identified a specific pattern of brain activity acting as a kind of & quot;signature & quot; for pain in the brain. Recently this so-called & quot;pain matrix & quot; has been called into question, and a new study by British researchers may have shattered the myth once and for all. < br > < br > The pain matrix is actually a cluster of regions in the brain that prior imaging studies indicated are involved in processing pain perception, including the posterior insula and the anterior cingulate cortex. This has been so broadly accepted that the signature pattern has been used...
Source: Psychology of Pain - May 10, 2016 Category: Anesthesiology Source Type: blogs
Scientists Have Been Using a Flawed Method to Diagnose Pain - Gizmodo
For many years, neuroscientists believed they had identified a specific pattern of brain activity acting as a kind of "signature" for pain in the brain. Recently this so-called "pain matrix" has been called into question, and a new study by British researchers may have shattered the myth once and for all.
The pain matrix is actually a cluster of regions in the brain that prior imaging studies indicated are involved in processing pain perception, including the posterior insula and the anterior cingulate cortex. This has been so broadly accepted that the signature pattern has been used to declare that em...
Source: Psychology of Pain - May 10, 2016 Category: Anesthesiology Source Type: blogs
Mind over back pain - Harvard Health Blog
To the surprise of doctors and patients alike, accumulating research suggests that most chronic back pain isn't actually the result of illness or injury. Study after study indicates instead that back pain is very often caused by our thoughts, feelings, and resulting behaviors. And an exciting new study now demonstrates that treatments aimed at our beliefs and attitudes can really help.When our back hurts, it's only natural to assume that we've suffered an injury or have a disease. After all, most pain works this way. When we cut our finger, we see blood and feel pain. When our throat hurts, it's usually because of an infec...
Source: Psychology of Pain - May 4, 2016 Category: Anesthesiology Source Type: blogs
F.D.A. Again Reviews Mandatory Training for Painkiller Prescribers - The New York Times
A pain management specialist, Dr. Nathaniel Katz, was stunned in 2012 when the Food and Drug Administration rejected a recommendation from an expert panel that had urged mandatory training for doctors who prescribed powerful painkillers like OxyContin.
That panel had concluded that the training might help stem the epidemic of overdose deaths involving prescription narcotics, or opioids. At first, Dr. Katz, who had been on the panel, thought that drug makers had pressured the F.D.A. to kill the proposal. Then an agency official told him that another group had fought the recommendation: the American Medical Association, the...
Source: Psychology of Pain - May 3, 2016 Category: Anesthesiology Source Type: blogs
Unlike sex and violence, childbirth is rarely depicted in literary fiction - Slate
Are there any taboo subjects left in literature? Graphic violence and sex in any of its endless variations have become mainstream. Even excretion is now explicit: Think of the unforgettable scene of Joey searching for a ring in his own shit in Jonathan Franzen's Freedom. But read almost any novel in which childbirth, one of the most universal of human events, takes place, and you will find that the actual act has been deleted. An author as celebrated for her visceral and detailed accounts of female experience as Elena Ferrante offers the following as a description, in full, of the birth of the narrator's first ch...
Source: Psychology of Pain - May 3, 2016 Category: Anesthesiology Source Type: blogs
Mindfulness Effective for Chronic Low Back Pain in Clinical Trial | Pain Research Forum
Government officials, physicians, and the public are increasingly aware of a need to move away from using opiate drugs to treat chronic pain. More and more, doctors are searching for ways to help patients manage pain with non-pharmacological interventions. In line with this trend, new findings now support the use of mindfulness to treat chronic low back pain.
In a clinical trial published March 22 in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), subjects who underwent mindfulness training for eight weeks were more likely to report improvements in pain, lasting up to a year, compared to people who received whatev...
Source: Psychology of Pain - May 2, 2016 Category: Anesthesiology Source Type: blogs
Botulinum Toxin Guidelines Overhauled | Medpage Today
VANCOUVER -- Guidelines for the use of botulinum toxin in various neurological disorders are getting an update, with the best evidence supporting the use of some formulations in spasticity and chronic migraine, researchers reported here.
All three botulinum toxin type A formulations are supported by level A evidence for use in upper limb spasticity, and onabotulinumtoxinA (Botox) received a level A recommendation in chronic migraine, although the magnitude of the benefit is small, according to David Simpson, MD, of Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York, and colleagues.
The new guidance, which is the first s...
Source: Psychology of Pain - April 19, 2016 Category: Anesthesiology Source Type: blogs
The Pain Gap: Why Doctors Offer Less Relief to Black Patients - The Daily Beast
A new University of Virginia study suggests that many medical students and residents are racially biased in their pain assessment, and that their attitudes about race and pain correlate with falsely-held beliefs about supposed biological differences—like black people having thicker skin, or less sensitive nerve endings than white people—more generally.The study highlights how a confluence of mistaken attitudes—about race, about biology, and about pain—can flourish in one of the worst possible places: medical schools where the future gatekeepers of relief are trained. And it illuminates what I've called th...
Source: Psychology of Pain - April 11, 2016 Category: Anesthesiology Source Type: blogs
The perils of being manly - The Washington Post
A few years ago, I found myself in the emergency room. I had hurt my ankle playing basketball, and the pain was unbearable. I remember sitting there, waiting for someone to see me, thinking to myself that it must be broken, or fractured, or something similarly severe.
"I'm going touch your ankle in a few places," the doctor said shortly after I was brought in. "I want you to describe the pain on a scale from 1 to 10."
He pressed down onto various parts of my foot, each one more painful than the last. And yet, the numbers I uttered barely nudged, moving up from 5 to 5.5, and then from 5.5 to 6. I n...
Source: Psychology of Pain - March 29, 2016 Category: Anesthesiology Source Type: blogs
National Pain Strategy - The Interagency Pain Research Coordinating Committee
This report identifies the key steps we can take to improve how we prevent, assess and treat pain in this country."In 2011, in recognition of the public health problem of pain in America, the Institute of Medicine called for a coordinated, national effort of public and private organizations to transform how the nation understands and approaches pain management and prevention. In response, HHS tasked the Interagency Pain Research Coordinating Committee (IPRCC), a group of representatives from the Department of Defense, Department of Veterans Affairs, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, Centers for Di...
Source: Psychology of Pain - March 23, 2016 Category: Anesthesiology Source Type: blogs
NYTimes: Patients in Pain, and a Doctor Who Must Limit Drugs
Susan Kubicka-Welander, a short-order cook, went to her pain checkup appointment straight from the lunch-rush shift. "We were really busy," she told Dr. Robert L. Wergin, trying to smile through deeply etched lines of exhaustion. "Thursdays, it's Philly cheesesteaks."
Her back ached from a compression fracture; a shattered elbow was still mending; her left-hip sciatica was screaming louder than usual. She takes a lot of medication for chronic pain, but today it was just not enough.
Yet rather than increasing her dose, Dr. Wergin was tapering her down. "Susan, we've got to get you to five ...
Source: Psychology of Pain - March 17, 2016 Category: Anesthesiology Source Type: blogs
