Millions Take Gabapentin for Pain. But There ’s Scant Evidence It Works. - The New York Times
One of the most widely prescribed prescription drugs, gabapentin, is being taken by millions of patients despite little or no evidence that it can relieve their pain.In 2006, I wrote about gabapentin after discovering accidentally that it could counter hot flashes.The drug was initially approved 25 years ago to treat seizure disorders, but it is now commonly prescribed off-label to treat all kinds of pain, acute and chronic, in addition to hot flashes, chronic cough and a host of other medical problems.The F.D.A. approves a drug for specific uses and doses if the company demonstrates it is safe and effective for its intend...
Source: Psychology of Pain - May 22, 2019 Category: Anesthesiology Source Type: blogs
Why Does The Brain Connect Pain With Emotions? : Shots - Health News : NPR
When Sterling Witt was a teenager in Missouri, he was diagnosed with scoliosis. Before long, the curvature of his spine started causing chronic pain.It was"this low-grade kind of menacing pain that ran through my spine and mostly my lower back and my upper right shoulder blade and then even into my neck a little bit," Witt says.The pain was bad. But the feeling of helplessness it produced in him was even worse."I felt like I was being attacked by this invisible enemy," Witt says."It was nothing that I asked for, and I didn't even know how to battle it."So he channeled his frustration into ...
Source: Psychology of Pain - May 20, 2019 Category: Anesthesiology Source Type: blogs
How Tiger Woods Won the Back Surgery Lottery - The New York Times
Few would have predicted that Tiger Woods would be playing in the P.G.A. Championship this week. He had three failed back surgeries, starting in 2014. He had taken opioids. His astonishing career seemed over.Then he had one more operation, a spinal fusion, the most complex of all, in 2017. And last month he won the Masters, playing the way he used to.An outcome like his from fusion surgery is so rare it is"like winning the lottery," Dr. Sohail K. Mirza, a spine surgeon at Dartmouth, said.The idea behind spinal fusion is to remove a disk — a ring of fibers filled with a nerve-cushioning jelly that joins adjacent...
Source: Psychology of Pain - May 16, 2019 Category: Anesthesiology Source Type: blogs
Virtual Reality as Therapy for Pain - The New York Times
I was packing up at the end of a family vacation in Florida when my back went into an excruciating spasm unrelieved by a fistful of pain medication. As my twin sons, then 8 years old, wheeled me through the airport, one of them suggested,"Mom, if you think about something else, it won't hurt so much."At the time, I failed to appreciate the wisdom of his advice. Now, four decades later, a sophisticated distraction technique is being used to help patients of all ages cope with pain, both acute and chronic. The method, called Virtual Reality Therapy, goes beyond simple distraction, as might result from watching ...
Source: Psychology of Pain - April 29, 2019 Category: Anesthesiology Source Type: blogs
National Pain Report – What You Don't Know Can Hurt You
The National Pain Report is the leading online news site dedicated to the coverage of chronic pain. We feature the latest developments in the treatment of chronic pain, public policy impacting chronic pain as well comments from leading pain specialists and columns from chronic pain sufferers.http://nationalpainreport.com/ (Source: Psychology of Pain)
Source: Psychology of Pain - April 14, 2019 Category: Anesthesiology Source Type: blogs
Why the sexes don ’t feel pain the same way
Robert Sorge was studying pain in mice in 2009, but he was the one who ended up with a headache.At McGill University in Montreal, Canada, Sorge was investigating how animals develop an extreme sensitivity to touch. To test for this response, Sorge poked the paws of mice using fine hairs, ones that wouldn't ordinarily bother them. The males behaved as the scientific literature said they would: they yanked their paws back from even the finest of threads.But females remained stoic to Sorge's gentle pokes and prods1."It just didn't work in the females," recalls Sorge, now a behaviourist at the University ...
Source: Psychology of Pain - April 3, 2019 Category: Anesthesiology Source Type: blogs
Acute to Chronic Pain Signatures | NIH Common Fund
This program will develop a set of objective biomarkers that provide a"signature" to predict a transition from acute to chronic pain, in order to accelerate therapy development and ultimately to guide pain prevention strategies. These biomarkers are greatly needed as the number of people who transition from acute to chronic pain after an acute pain event is surprisingly high. This high prevalence of chronic pain in the US has in part contributed to the current opioid epidemic.A major challenge in pain management is preventing chronic pain from occurring after an acute pain event. For most people, acute pain resol...
Source: Psychology of Pain - April 2, 2019 Category: Anesthesiology Source Type: blogs
How Pain Tolerance and Anxiety Seem to Be Connected - The New York Times
An article this week about Jo Cameron, who has lived for 71 years without experiencing pain or anxiety because she has a rare genetic mutation, prompted questions from New York Times readers.The notion that the same gene could be responsible for the way a person processes physical and psychological pain left many perplexed: Aren't they totally different? Or does her story hint that sensitivity to one type of pain might be intertwined with sensitivity to another?Childbirth, Ms. Cameron said, felt like"a tickle." She often relies on her husband to alert her when she is bleeding, bruised or burned because nothin...
Source: Psychology of Pain - April 1, 2019 Category: Anesthesiology Source Type: blogs
At 71, She ’s Never Felt Pain or Anxiety. Now Scientists Know Why. - The New York Times
She'd been told that childbirth was going to be painful. But as the hours wore on, nothing bothered her — even without an epidural."I could feel that my body was changing, but it didn't hurt me," recalled the woman, Jo Cameron, who is now 71. She likened it to"a tickle." Later, she would tell prospective mothers,"Don't worry, it's not as bad as people say it is."It was only recently — more than four decades later — that she learned her friends were not exaggerating.Rather, there was something different about the way her body experienced pain: For the most part, it didn...
Source: Psychology of Pain - April 1, 2019 Category: Anesthesiology Source Type: blogs
Opinion | Is Pain a Sensation or an Emotion? - The New York Times
The United States uses a third of the world's opioids but a fifth of Americans still say they suffer from chronic pain. The only demonstrable effect of two decades of widespread prescription of opioids has been catastrophic harm. With more than 47,000 Americans dying of opioid overdoses in 2017 and hundreds of thousandsmore addicted to them, it was recently reported that, for the first time, Americans were more likely to die of opioids than of car accidents.This has forced many to take a step back and ponder the very nature of pain, to understand how best to alleviate it.The ancient Greeks considered pain a passion —...
Source: Psychology of Pain - March 18, 2019 Category: Anesthesiology Source Type: blogs
Could The Cure For A Rare Chronic Pain Disorder Be ... More Pain? : Shots - Health News : NPR
There's a before, and there's an after.In the before, it was a relatively normal night. The kind of night any 14-year-old girl might have.Devyn ate dinner, watched TV and had small, unremarkable interactions with her family. Then, around 10 o'clock, she decided to turn in."I went to bed as I normally would, and then all of a sudden ... my hips... they just hurt unimaginably!" Devyn says."I started crying, and I started shaking."It was around midnight, but the pain was so intense she couldn't stop herself — she cried out so loudly she woke her mother, Sheila. Together, they did everythi...
Source: Psychology of Pain - March 10, 2019 Category: Anesthesiology Source Type: blogs
Managing Children ’s Pain After Surgery - The New York Times
Pain control in infants and children has come a long way over the past few decades. Experts know how to provide appropriate anesthesia when children need surgery and understand the ways that even very young children express distress when they're hurting afterward. There is a lot of evidence about reducing the pain and anxiety that can accompany immunizations and blood draws, and there is increasing expertise about helping children who struggle with chronic pain.But today's parents may be shocked to learn that was not always the case. As recently as the early 1980s, the pain of children and infants was thought to be...
Source: Psychology of Pain - February 1, 2019 Category: Anesthesiology Source Type: blogs
Spinal Fractures Can Be Terribly Painful. A Common Treatment Isn ’t Helping. - The New York Times
Scientists warned osteoporosis patients on Thursday to avoid two common procedures used to shore up painful fractures in crumbling spines.The treatments, which involve injecting bone cement into broken vertebrae, relieve pain no better than a placebo does, according to an expert task force convened by the American Society for Bone and Mineral Research.The task force noted that the pain goes away or diminishes within six weeks without the procedure. Patients should take painkillers instead, the experts said, and maybe try back braces and physical therapy.More ...https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/24/health/spinal-fracture-trea...
Source: Psychology of Pain - January 24, 2019 Category: Anesthesiology Source Type: blogs
Repeated pain makes men more sensitive — but not women | CBC Radio
Dr. Loren Martin and his colleagues were actually investigating another question when they discovered this surprising result. They were measuring how multiple sources of pain changed pain perception.In experiments, in mice they used a heat probe that created an mild level of heat on the mouse's feet. Then they gave the mice a dose of vinegar to upset their stomachs. The mice, unsurprisingly, didn't like it.The suprise came when they they repeated the experiment. The male mice showed more stress when brought back to the location of the experiment, and had stronger responses to the heat stimuli - they were more sensi...
Source: Psychology of Pain - January 20, 2019 Category: Anesthesiology Source Type: blogs
Managing Children ’s Pain After Surgery - The New York Times
Pain control in infants and children has come a long way over the past few decades. Experts know how to provide appropriate anesthesia when children need surgery and understand the ways that even very young children express distress when they're hurting afterward. There is a lot of evidence about reducing the pain and anxiety that can accompany immunizations and blood draws, and there is increasing expertise about helping children who struggle with chronic pain.But today's parents may be shocked to learn that was not always the case. As recently as the early 1980s, the pain of children and infants was thought to be...
Source: Psychology of Pain - January 14, 2019 Category: Anesthesiology Source Type: blogs
