Chronic Pain Is a Hidden Epidemic. It’s Time for a Revolution. NYT

[Jaybee00]

Good in depth article—mentions fibromyalgia.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/12/...e_code=1.ok4.Ggyl.jPE4qqT8991M&smid=url-share

 

[shak8]

Good in depth article—mentions fibromyalgia.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/12/...e_code=1.ok4.Ggyl.jPE4qqT8991M&smid=url-share

Yes, worth the long read.

Good comments section though some commenters are convinced that mind cures pain. Oh woo.

I felt compelled to comment re my FM.

 

[Jaybee00]

Yeah, some interesting comments, including some on “Long Covid” and Lyme.

Have to say that I’m not particularly optimistic about any new candidate drugs in the pipeline. I posted about the Vertex drug here (not different from placebo)
https://www.s4me.info/threads/vertexs-painkiller-results-match-placebo-in-study-shares-tumble.41723/

 

[Arnie Pye]

@Jaybee00

Thank you for the link. It was an interesting read.

 

[rvallee]

It took the opioid epidemic to make government agencies finally recognize the scale of the problem, and the fact that millions of people with chronic pain had frighteningly few options

Not really the right framing, it hasn't lead to the problem being recognized, rather it has forced the issue to be addressed because of all the criminality and deaths that developed around it. The problem went from being a medical problem to being a law enforcement and fraud problem.

So in a way, the scandal of a few companies pumping up dangerously addictive drugs, for which stopping is actually the main issue, creating this vast non-medical problem was necessary to create the motivation to, maybe, do something about it. Because the problem itself is simply not taken seriously.

Although it's interesting to note how the root cause can be so easily identified, yet it's completely impossible to even think about fixing it:

One big reason chronic pain has been undertreated and shrugged off for decades is that medicine tends to trivialize conditions it lacks the tools to explain.

This is the root cause of most failures in health care: the harder the problem, the less motivation there is to solve it. It's never addressed. Never fixed. Fixing this would yield enormous benefits, but there is simply no appetite because it requires self-reflection that medicine is incapable of. So the motivation to solve things must be imposed from above, usually involving institutions that depend on expert advice to decide how to assign resources. Which is just the same problem with a funny hat.

Overall a much smarter take than usual, despite the odd mention of CBT and some hint of what is likely central sensitization, but just as sideshows. Shows how long the way will be, there's been maybe a handful of steps on this journey. Makes the whole psychobehavioral approach actually evil and stupid by comparison, all it does is delay a solution.