To treat back pain, look to the brain not the spine | Aeon Essays
For patient after patient seeking to cure chronic back pain, the experience is years of frustration. Whether they strive to treat their aching muscles, bones and ligaments through physical therapy, massage or rounds of surgery, relief is often elusive – if the pain has not been made even worse. Now a new working hypothesis explains why: persistent back pain with no obvious mechanical source does not always result from tissue damage. Instead, that pain is generated by the central nervous system (CNS) and lives within the brain itself.I caught my first whiff of this news about eight years ago, when I was starting the resea...
Source: Psychology of Pain - September 24, 2017 Category: Anesthesiology Source Type: blogs
The First Count of Fentanyl Deaths in 2016: Up 540% in Three Years - The New York Times
Drug overdoses killed roughly 64,000 people in the United States last year, according to the first governmental account of nationwide drug deaths to cover all of 2016. It's a staggering rise of more than 22 percent over the 52,404 drug deaths recorded the previous year — and even higher than The New York Times's estimatein June, which was based on earlier preliminary data.Drug overdoses are expected to remain the leading cause of death for Americans under 50, as synthetic opioids — primarily fentanyl and its analogues — continue to push the death count higher. Drug deaths involving fentanyl more than doubled ...
Source: Psychology of Pain - September 5, 2017 Category: Anesthesiology Source Type: blogs
Pain News - Medical Xpress
https://medicalxpress.com/search/sort/date/3d/?search=pain (Source: Psychology of Pain)
Source: Psychology of Pain - September 5, 2017 Category: Anesthesiology Source Type: blogs
Opioids Aren ’t the Only Pain Drugs to Fear - The New York Times
Last month, a White House panel declared the nation's epidemic of opioid abuse and deaths"a national public health emergency," a designation usually assigned to natural disasters.A disaster is indeed what it is, with 142 Americans dying daily from drug overdoses, a fourfold increase since 1999, more than the number of people killed by gun homicides and vehicular crashes combined. A 2015 National Survey on Drug Use and Health estimated that 3.8 million Americans use opioids for nonmedical reasons every month.Lest you think that people seeking chemically induced highs are solely responsible for the problem, phy...
Source: Psychology of Pain - September 4, 2017 Category: Anesthesiology Source Type: blogs
Cutting down on opioids has made life miserable for chronic pain patients - Slate
On July 26, Todd Graham, 56, a well-respected rehabilitation specialist in Mishawaka, Indiana, lost his life. Earlier that day, a woman complaining of chronic pain had come to Graham's office in hope of receiving an opioid such as Percocet, Vicodin, or long-acting OxyContin. He reportedly told her that opioids were not an appropriate first-line treatment for long-term pain —a view now shared by professionals—and she, reportedly, accepted his opinion. Her husband, however, became irate. Later, he tracked down the doctor and shot him twice in the head.This horrific story has been showcased to confirm that physicians ...
Source: Psychology of Pain - August 30, 2017 Category: Anesthesiology Source Type: blogs
The Conversation Placebo - The New York Times
In my daily work as a primary care internist, I see no letup from pain. Every single patient, it seems, has an aching shoulder or a bum knee or a painful back."Our bodies evolved to live about 40 years," I always explain,"and then be finished off by a mammoth or a microbe." Thanks to a century of staggering medical progress, we now live past 80, but evolution hasn't caught up; the cartilage in our joints still wears down in our 40s, and we are more obese and more sedentary than we used to be, which doesn't help.So it's no surprise that chronic arthritis and back pain are the second and third...
Source: Psychology of Pain - August 29, 2017 Category: Anesthesiology Source Type: blogs
A New Brain Measure of Nociception in Infants | Pain Research Forum
Unlike adults, infants can't tell you if they're in pain. Instead, clinicians must interpret behaviors such as crying and physiological measures such as heart rate to determine what a newborn is experiencing. Since these can occur for reasons unrelated to nociception, the pain field has long sought more objective ways to measure pain in this nonverbal population. Now, in a new study, investigators have identified pain-related brain activity in infants that could be measured with a simple electroencephalogram (EEG) recording and used the activity to create an EEG template that allowed them to test the efficacy of an...
Source: Psychology of Pain - August 24, 2017 Category: Anesthesiology Source Type: blogs
Women are flocking to wellness because modern medicine still doesn ’t take them seriously - Quartz
The wellness movement is having a moment. The more luxurious aspects of it were on full display last weekend at the inaugural summitof Gwyneth Paltrow's lifestyle brand Goop, from crystal therapy to $66 jade eggs meant to be worn in the vagina. Meanwhile, juice cleanses,"clean eating," and hand-carved lamps made of pink Himalayan salthave all gone decidedly mainstream. I myself will cop to having participated in a sound bath —basically meditating for 90 minutes in a dark room while listening to gongs and singing bowls. (I felt amazingly weird afterward, in the best possible way.)It seems that privileged wom...
Source: Psychology of Pain - August 20, 2017 Category: Anesthesiology Source Type: blogs
A comprehensive guide to the new science of treating lower back pain - Vox
Cathryn Jakobson Ramin's back pain started when she was 16, on the day she flew off her horse and landed on her right hip.For the next four decades, Ramin says her back pain was like a small rodent nibbling at the base of her spine. The aching left her bedridden on some days and made it difficult to work, run a household, and raise her two boys.By 2008, after Ramin had exhausted what seemed like all her options, she elected to have a"minimally invasive" nerve decompression procedure. But the $8,000 operation didn't fix her back, either. The same pain remained, along with new neck aches.More ...https://www...
Source: Psychology of Pain - August 13, 2017 Category: Anesthesiology Source Type: blogs
Surgery Is One Hell Of A Placebo | FiveThirtyEight
The guy's desperate. The pain in his knee has made it impossible to play basketball or walk down stairs. In search of a cure, he makes a journey to a healing place, where he'll undergo a fasting rite, don ceremonial garb, ingest mind-altering substances and be anointed with liquids before a masked healer takes him through a physical ritual intended to vanquish his pain.Seen through different eyes, the process of modern surgery may look more more spiritual than scientific, said orthopedic surgeon Stuart Green, a professor at the University of California, Irvine. Our hypothetical patient is undergoing arthroscopic kn...
Source: Psychology of Pain - August 13, 2017 Category: Anesthesiology Source Type: blogs
Almost half of all opioid misuse starts with a friend or family member's prescription | PBS NewsHour
More than half of adults who misused opioids did not have a prescription, and many obtained drugs for free from friends or relatives, according to a national survey of more than 50,000 adults.Although many people need medical narcotics for legitimate reasons, the National Survey on Drug Use and Health reported Monday that regular access to prescription opioids can facilitate misuse. The results, outlined in the Annals of Internal Medicine, indicate when the medical community overprescribes opioids, unused drugs are then available for abuse.More ...http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/opioid-misuse-starts-friend-family-membe...
Source: Psychology of Pain - August 2, 2017 Category: Anesthesiology Source Type: blogs
‘Extreme’ Use of Painkillers and Doctor Shopping Plague Medicare, New Report Says - ProPublica
In Washington, D.C., a Medicare beneficiary filled prescriptions for 2,330 pills of oxycodone, hydromorphone and morphine in a single month last year — written by just one of the 42 health providers who prescribed the person such drugs.In Illinois, a different Medicare enrollee received 73 prescriptions for opioid drugs from 11 prescribers and filled them at 20 different pharmacies. He sometimes filled prescriptions at multiple pharmacies on the same day.These are among the examples cited in a sobering new report released today by the inspector general of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The IG...
Source: Psychology of Pain - July 14, 2017 Category: Anesthesiology Source Type: blogs
The weird power of the placebo effect, explained - Vox
Over the last several years, doctors noticed a mystifying trend: Fewer and fewer new pain drugs were getting through double-blind placebo control trials, the gold standard for testing a drug ' s effectiveness.In these trials, neither doctors nor patients know who is on the active drug and who is taking an inert pill. At the end of the trial, the two groups are compared. If those who actually took the drug report significantly greater improvement than those on placebo, then it ' s worth prescribing.When researchers started looking closely at pain-drug clinical trials, they found that an average of 27 percent of patients in ...
Source: Psychology of Pain - July 14, 2017 Category: Anesthesiology Source Type: blogs
Bring On the Exercise, Hold the Painkillers - The New York Times
Taking ibuprofen and related over-the-counter painkillers could have unintended and worrisome consequences for people who vigorously exercise. These popular medicines, known as nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, or NSAIDs, work by suppressing inflammation. But according to two new studies, in the process they potentially may also overtax the kidneys during prolonged exercise and reduce muscles' ability to recover afterward.Anyone who spends time around people who exercise knows that painkiller use is common among them. Some athletes joke about taking"vitamin I," or ibuprofen, to blunt the pain of strenuous...
Source: Psychology of Pain - July 6, 2017 Category: Anesthesiology Source Type: blogs
The opioid crisis changed how doctors think about pain - Vox
WILLIAMSON, West Virginia — This town on the eastern border of Kentucky has 3,150 residents, one hotel, one gas station, one fire station — and about 50 opiate overdoses each month.On the first weekend of each month, when public benefits like disability get paid out, the local fire chief estimates the city sees about half a million dollars in drug sales. The area is poor — 29 percent of county residents live in poverty, and, amid the retreat of the coal industry, the unemployment rate was 12.2 percent when I visited last August— and those selling pills are not always who you'd expect."Elderly folks who dep...
Source: Psychology of Pain - June 22, 2017 Category: Anesthesiology Source Type: blogs
