Complementary and Alternative Medicine Treatments for Chronic Pain

What is “complementary,” “alternative,” or “integrative” medicine? The names are confusing, but people now use the terms “complementary” and “integrative” to refer to acupuncture, massage, herbs, guided imagery, hypnosis, meditation, yoga—the list goes on and on—to convey the idea that these techniques are used along...

Marijuana

What is marijuana? “Marijuana” refers to the dried leaves, flowers, stems, and seeds from Cannabis sativa, a psychoactive plant with significant healing properties that has been around for millennia. It contains more than 400 different chemical compounds, including more than 100 cannabinoids, some...

Introduction

In the United States alone, 100 million Americans—40 percent of adults—live in chronic pain, according to the Institute of Medicine. This is clearly an underestimate because the report does not count children, people in the military, or people in nursing homes or prisons. In fact,...

Western Medicine Treatments for Chronic Pain

Overall, how effective is Western medicine at treating chronic pain? Not very, which is especially discouraging for people with low back pain, headaches, joint pain, and neck pain—the biggest causes of chronic noncancer pain in America.1 Indeed, more than 28 percent of all...

The Opioid Mess Worldwide

On June 1, 2014, in India, the parents of an eight-year-old boy watched in horror as he writhed in pain from a severe genetic disorder. The hospital, like most other hospitals in India, had no morphine. Eventually, the parents did the only thing they could...

The Opioid Mess in the United States

What is the “opioid mess”? It’s the fact that we have two colliding epidemics: the epidemic of chronic pain, which receives almost no media coverage, and the epidemic of opioid abuse, which receives a lot. A 2014 report from a workshop on opioids and chronic...

Who is Hardest Hit by Chronic Pain?

The short answer is women, blacks and Hispanics, children, older people, and the poor. We’ll talk about the poor as part of the discussion about the global inequality of access to morphine and other opioids, especially at the end of life. In this chapter, we...

The Way Forward

In the past few decades, people with AIDS, breast cancer, disabilities, and other conditions have managed—by banding together, shedding their shame, and taking to the streets—to put their diseases on the world’s radar screen. Haggard men with AIDS hung quilts in cities around the world...

What is Chronic Pain?

What is pain? The official definition of pain is “an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage, or described in terms of such damage.” This comes from the International Association for the Study of Pain, the world’s top pain research...