Hi. I'm Rowe Jones, a former chronic pain sufferer. This site is all about supplying you with the latest information on chronic pain (headache, back pain, arthritis and fibromyalgia). I also want to help motivate you to help make your life a little brighter.
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Giving #ChronicPain a Medical Platform of Its Own
Most doctors view pain as a symptom of an underlying problem — treat the disease or the injury, and the pain goes away.
But for large numbers of patients, the pain never goes away. In a sweeping review issued last month, the Institute of Medicine — the medical branch of the National Academy of Sciences — estimated that chronic pain afflicts 116 million Americans, far more than previously believed.
The toll documented in the report is staggering. Childbirth, for example, is a common source of chronic pain: The institute found that 18 percent of women who have Caesarean deliveries and 10 percent who have vaginal deliveries report still being in pain a year later.
Ten percent to 50 percent of surgical patients who have pain after surgery go on to develop chronic pain, depending on the procedure, and for as many as 10 percent of those patients, the chronic postoperative pain is severe. (About 1 in 4 Americans suffer from frequent lower back pain.)
