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Disparities in Pain Management: Examining Cultural Inequities and the Critical Role of Behavioral Health Providers
For decades, pain management and the treatment of chronic pain (CP) have proven to be a complex, costly, and challenging area within the healthcare industry. While advancements in best practices for treating CP have evolved to include multimethod and multidisciplinary team approaches that...
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Chronic Pain and Its Impacts: An Overview & Possible Management Options
When a person goes through depression, the impact of that weight can manifest in the form of physical pain and other bodily discomfort. On the other hand, chronic pain has a significant effect on behavioral health. Recurring physical pain can lead to mood swings, lack of appetite, lack of...
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Coping With Chronic Pain: Good Advice Is Easy to Give but Hard to Take
Like many people, I live with pain every day. I’m lucky that, for the most part, my pain is tolerable and doesn’t interfere too much with my life. I walk slowly—but I walk. I sleep badly, but I sleep. It’s tough to sit in a car going long distances. Fortunately, my wife now does the...
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NYSPA Report – Chronic Pain and Behavioral Health: Underlying Data and Regulatory Responses
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) defines chronic pain as pain lasting more than three months that can result from an underlying medical disease or condition, injury, medical treatment, inflammation, or unknown cause.1 Studies find a strong correlation between pain and mental...
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Pain and Its Impact on the Opioid Epidemic
In several past articles on the opioid epidemic in America, I have complained that the problem of severe, chronic pain has been overlooked as a contributing factor. It appears that that is no longer true. For example, a very recent report by the National Academies of Science to the Food and Drug...
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The Epidemic of Opiate Abuse: Its Causes and (Potential) Solutions
The use of mind and mood altering substances is certainly not unique to our modern post-industrialized society. Epidemics of substance use and addiction have ravaged communities for hundreds of years. Homo Sapiens and their ancestors have sought relief from suffering for as long as suffering has...
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Pharmacogenomic Testing in Pain Management and Behavioral Health: A Pharmacist Perspective
Pain, in its many forms (e.g., nociceptive, neuropathic, inflammatory, etc.), affects upwards of 100 million people in the United States resulting in costs reaching $600 billion per year.1 Treatment of pain symptoms through the inappropriate prescribing and use of opioids has fueled an opioid abuse...
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Pain and The Nation’s Opioid Epidemic: An Interview with Luana Colloca, MD, PhD, MS
The so-called “opioid epidemic” is a far more complex social phenomenon than it appears to be when politicians and pundits propose solutions to it. They work largely from a simplistic and only partially true narrative that lately concludes that the villains are the drug companies that promoted...
