Plagued by chronic pain? Treatment teams can help
Pain
When I was a Workers’ Compensation Adjuster years ago, Chronic Pain was such a difficult symptom to treat and get people back to work (or MMI–that is, Maximum Medical Improvement). It is such a subjective symptom, Chronic Pain, that it’s difficult to treat. Clients that I had would rather have had Morphine Drips than attend pain management clinics. It’s great that this is out.
In the study, published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Dr. Steven K. Dobscha, of Portland VA Medical Center in Oregon, looked at 401 people with an average age of 61 or 62 who were in pain for at least three months. (They excluded those diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome or fibromyalgia.)
Not only did the study subjects have chronic pain due to arthritis, a bad back, or neck or joint pain that had lasted sometimes for years, but they often also had other physical and mental health problems along with a disability, such as depression or post-traumatic stress disorder.
Treating people in chronic pain is a huge challenge for physicians, said Von Korff. Tests to track down the pain’s source, such as high-tech imaging, are costly and of questionable benefit. And once a doctor rules out causes of pain that would require immediate medical treatment, he added, there’s not much else he or she can do. Aggressive strategies for pain relief, like surgery, are expensive and risky, and they often don’t help.
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