Chronic pain affects Hundreds of hundreds of thousands of individuals all around the world. But the Opioid crisis in North America led many healthcare providers to appreciate that they were relying too heavily on medications to alleviate their patients' pain.
In this episode of The weekly conversation Podcast, a pain specialist discusses recent developments in pain treatment and why there’s hope for patients with chronic pain.
Amanda Mascarelli, senior health and medicine editor at The Conversation within the US, began looking into chronic pain management after her mother fell and broke her leg. After her first prosthetic failed and she or he was left living with excruciating pain, a widely known orthopedic surgeon told her mother that due to her age and other risks, it was higher to endure the pain than undergo one other major surgery. “I just couldn't accept that in this day and age there was nothing that could be done for my mother to relieve her pain,” she recalls.
One of the people Mascarelli contacted looking for advice for her mother was Rachael Rzasa Lynn, an associate professor of anesthesiology on the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. Rzasa Lynn makes a speciality of helping patients manage chronic pain, or pain that lasts longer than three months.
Read more: New treatments offer much-needed hope for patients with chronic pain
Rzasa Lynn explains that the pain management tools she will be able to offer her patients include each long-established remedies and physical therapyDrugs and surgery, in addition to some recent methods similar to neuromodulation, which involves implanting an electrical device right into a patient's body to alter the variety of signals flowing through a specific nerve.
Another recent method Rzasa Lynn is capable of recommend to her patients is pain reprocessing therapy, a behavioral approach to pain relief. This therapy involves guiding patients to perform painful movements and helping them reappraise the sensations they’re experiencing. She explains that this helps:
Retrain the brain and begin rewiring a few of these nociplastic pathways which have developed and are resulting in pain that has no real reason to occur.
Still, Rzasa Lynn recognizes that this trial-and-error approach could be difficult for patients, and she or he hopes that further research will make it easier for clinicians to find out which treatments are effective for his or her patients.
The holy grail of pain medicine is to work out which patients with the identical disease will reply to the identical treatment. Because two individuals with seemingly similar diseases may experience completely different pain and reply to treatments completely in a different way. My best hope for the long run of pain medicine is that we are able to recuperate at predicting who will reply to a specific treatment the primary time.
Listen to the total interview between Amanda Mascarelli and Rachael Rzasa Lynn on The Conversation Weekly podcast.
Disclosure Statement: Rachael Rzasa Lynn receives funding from the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Defense, and the Institute of Cannabis Research at Colorado State University – Pueblo. She serves on the board of directors of the Colorado Pain Society.
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A transcript of this episode is available on Apple Podcasts.
This episode of The Conversation Weekly was written and produced by Katie Flood with assistance from Mend Mariwany. Sound design is by Eloise Stevens and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl.
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