Chronic Pain is a Hidden Epidemic

[matsushima]

After seeing the patient, Motzkin reviewed an M.R.I. of his neck and found a lesion on his spinal cord — a possible sign of multiple sclerosis. When Motzkin told the man about the lesion, and that it might be contributing to his new symptoms, the man started to cry: not because of what the scan found, but because someone had finally listened and taken his experience seriously.

“He’d basically given up,” Motzkin said. “He’d been treated like he was overreacting, that nothing had changed. But that wasn’t true.”

This attitude is deeply rooted. For years, Motzkin noted, people with migraines were often institutionalized and in some cases even lobotomized. Then, in the 1950s, a drug called methysergide was discovered that prevented migraine in a huge number of people. “All of a sudden,” he said, “migraine stopped being a psychiatric diagnosis and became a medical condition.”

There are many similar examples: conditions that were initially misdiagnosed or dismissed, either because doctors didn’t understand them or because they didn’t yet have the right test or treatment. That continues to be true. We still have no good way to measure dysfunction in pain and temperature nerves, and no way to reliably quantify changes in our brain’s pain circuit.

-Chronic Pain Is a Hidden Epidemic. It’s Time for a Revolution. by Jennifer Kahn for New York Times

Comments

[matsushima]

I'm always clenched when I read stuff about chronic pain treatment because it so often uncritically repeats opioid epidemic panic talking points without critically examining underlying causes. This article really shows why "nothing about us without us" is so important: because the author has experienced (and is still experiencing) unexplained chronic pain, she's much more sympathetic and doesn't give into the "suck it up, buttercup" narrative you often see.

[lassarina]

I am still furious that I tried to get primary care doctors to take my migraines seriously for 20 years, accomplished nothing, and yet within 1 minute in a neuro's office he was like "yeah okay you clearly get migraines let's do these two scans and also get you some drugs" and I almost cried.