New Drug Offers Hope to Millions With Severe Migraines - The New York Times
The first medicine designed to prevent migraines was approved by the Food and Drug Administration on Thursday, ushering in what many experts believe will be a new era in treatment for people who suffer the most severe form of these headaches.The drug, Aimovig, made by Amgen and Novartis, is a monthly injection with a device similar to an insulin pen. The list price will be $6,900 a year, and Amgen said the drug will be available to patients within a week.Aimovig blocks a protein fragment, CGRP, that instigates and perpetuates migraines. Three other companies — Lilly, Teva and Alder — have similar medicines in the final...
Source: Psychology of Pain - May 18, 2018 Category: Anesthesiology Source Type: blogs
Treatments Prescribed For Lower Back Pain Are Often Ineffective, Report Says : NPR
Chances are, you — or someone you know — has suffered from lower back pain.It can be debilitating. It's a leading cause of disability globally.And the number of people with the often-chronic condition is likely to increase.This warning comes via a series of articles published in the medical journal Lancet in March. They state that about 540 million people have lower back pain — and they predict that the number will jump as the world's population ages and as populations in lower- and middle-income countries move to urban centers and adopt more sedentary lives."We don't think about [back pain] the same...
Source: Psychology of Pain - May 10, 2018 Category: Anesthesiology Source Type: blogs
Lack Of Research On Medical Marijuana Leaves Patients In The Dark : Shots - Health News : NPR
By the time Ann Marie Owen, 61, turned to marijuana to treat her pain, she was struggling to walk and talk. She was also hallucinating.For four years, her doctor prescribed a wide range of opioids for transverse myelitis, a debilitating disease that caused pain, muscle weakness and paralysis.The drugs not only failed to ease her symptoms, they hooked her.When her home state of New York legalized marijuana for the treatment of select medical ailments, Owens decided it was time to swap pills for pot. But her doctors refused to help."Even though medical marijuana is legal, none of my doctors were willing to talk to me ab...
Source: Psychology of Pain - April 10, 2018 Category: Anesthesiology Source Type: blogs
Naloxone Stops Opioid Overdoses. How Do You Use It? - The New York Times
The United States surgeon general issued a rare national advisory on Thursday urging more Americans to carry naloxone, a drug used to revive people overdosing on opioids.The last time a surgeon general issued such an urgent warning to the country was in 2005, when Richard H. Carmona advised women not to drink alcohol when pregnant.More ...https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/06/us/naloxone-narcan-opioid-overdose.html (Source: Psychology of Pain)
Source: Psychology of Pain - April 7, 2018 Category: Anesthesiology Source Type: blogs
Medicare Is Cracking Down on Opioids. Doctors Fear Pain Patients Will Suffer. - The New York Times
Medicare officials thought they had finally figured out how to do their part to fix the troubling problem of opioids being overprescribed to the old and disabled: In 2016, a staggering one in three of 43.6 million beneficiaries of the federal health insurance program had been prescribed the painkillers.Medicare, they decided, would now refuse to pay for long-term, high-dose prescriptions; a rule to that effect is expected to be approved on April 2. Some medical experts have praised the regulation as a check on addiction.But the proposal has also drawn a broad and clamorous blowback from many people who ...
Source: Psychology of Pain - March 28, 2018 Category: Anesthesiology Source Type: blogs
America's War on Pain Pills Is Killing Addicts and Leaving Patients in Agony - Reason.com
Craig, a middle-aged banking consultant who was on his school ' s lacrosse team in college and played professionally for half a dozen years after graduating, began developing back problems in his early 30s. " Degenerative disc disease runs in my family, and the constant pounding on AstroTurf probably did not help, " he says. One day, he recalls, " I was lifting a railroad tie out of the ground with a pick ax, straddled it, and felt the pop. That was my first herniation. "After struggling with herniated discs and neuropathy, Craig consulted with " about 10 different surgeons " and decided to have his bottom three vertebrae ...
Source: Psychology of Pain - March 23, 2018 Category: Anesthesiology Source Type: blogs
What's in a Name for Chronic Pain? | Pain Research Forum
For decades, pain researchers have set their sights on understanding pain mechanisms —the cellular and molecular machinery underlying chronic pain. In doing so, they became increasingly aware that the terms they used to describe the neurobiological workings of pain did not always match what they had learned.But now, official adoption by the International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP) of an IASP terminology task force recommendation for a so-called"third mechanistic descriptor" of chronic pain could move the field forward in its efforts to more fully characterize the known pathophysiological mechanism...
Source: Psychology of Pain - March 23, 2018 Category: Anesthesiology Source Type: blogs
Handing out naloxone doesn ’t fix opioid crisis | Dalla Lana School of Public Health
In the midst of a national opioid crisis, take-home naloxone programs have expanded rapidly. Ontario ' s Minister of Health and Long Term Care Dr. Eric Hoskins recently announced that naloxone kits will be provided to fire and police departments across the province, but U of T researchers are questioning whether naloxone distribution might distance people from health-care services or worsen health inequities.More ...http://www.dlsph.utoronto.ca/2018/02/handing-out-naloxone-doesnt-fix-opioid-crisis/? (Source: Psychology of Pain)
Source: Psychology of Pain - March 13, 2018 Category: Anesthesiology Source Type: blogs
“Brave Men” and “Emotional Women”: A Theory-Guided Literature Review on Gender Bias in Health Care and Gendered Norms towards Patients with Chronic Pain - Pain Research and Management
Conclusions. Awareness about gendered norms is important, both in research and clinical practice, in order to counteract gender bias in health care and to support health-care professionals in providing more equitable care that is more capable to meet the need of all patients, men and women.https://www.hindawi.com/journals/prm/2018/6358624/ (Source: Psychology of Pain)
Source: Psychology of Pain - February 26, 2018 Category: Anesthesiology Source Type: blogs
Migraine Relief May Be On The Way With New Therapies In Development : Shots - Health News : NPR
Humans have suffered from migraines for millennia. Yet, despite decades of research, there isn't a drug on the market today that prevents them by targeting the underlying cause. All of that could change in a few months when the FDA is expected to announce its decision about new therapies that have the potential to turn migraine treatment on its head.The new therapies are based on research begun in the 1980s showing that people in the throes of a migraine attack have high levels of a protein called calcitonin gene –related peptide (CGRP) in their blood.Step by step, researchers tracked and studied this neurochemical&#...
Source: Psychology of Pain - February 8, 2018 Category: Anesthesiology Source Type: blogs
PAS-18-624: Mechanistic investigations of psychosocial stress effects on opioid use patterns (R01- Clinical Trial Optional)
Psychosocial stress, defined here as socioenvironmental demands that tax the adaptive capacity of the individual (e.g., low socioeconomic status, childhood adversity, bullying), has repeatedly been linked to substance use disorders (SUDs). Neighborhood poverty and social support are shown to influence substance use patterns. Among smokers, multiple psychosocial stressors are associated with relapse, and acute psychosocial stress has been demonstrated to enhance cigarette craving and smoking behavior. Similarly, psychosocial stress has been associated with greater risk of relapse in individuals with alcohol and cocaine use ...
Source: Psychology of Pain - February 5, 2018 Category: Anesthesiology Source Type: blogs
A Doctor ’s Painful Struggle With an Opioid-Addicted Patient - Siddhartha Mukherjee - The New York Times
I once found myself entrapped by a patient as much as she felt trapped by me. It was the summer of 2001, and I was running a small internal-medicine clinic, supervised by a preceptor, on the fourth floor of a perpetually chilly Boston building. Most of the work involved routine primary care — the management of diabetes, blood pressure and heart disease. It was soft, gratifying labor; the night before a new patient's visit, I would usually sift through any notes that were sent ahead and jot my remarks in the margins. The patient's name was S., I learned. She had made four visits to the emergency room complaining o...
Source: Psychology of Pain - February 5, 2018 Category: Anesthesiology Source Type: blogs
Natural painkiller nasal spray could replace addictive opioids, trial indicates | The Guardian
A nasal spray that delivers a natural painkiller to the brain could transform the lives of patients by replacing the dangerous and addictive prescription opioids that have wreaked havoc in the US and claimed the lives of thousands of people.Scientists at University College London found they could alleviate pain in animals with a nasal spray that delivered millions of soluble nanoparticles filled with a natural opioid directly into the brain. In lab tests, the animals showed no signs of becoming tolerant to the compound's pain-relieving effects, meaning the risk of overdose should be far lower.The researchers are now ra...
Source: Psychology of Pain - February 3, 2018 Category: Anesthesiology Source Type: blogs
News Archive | Pain Research Forum
All of our news and discussion content, research resources and member services are provided free to researchers, clinicians and others interested in the problem of chronic pain.https://www.painresearchforum.org/news/archive (Source: Psychology of Pain)
Source: Psychology of Pain - January 30, 2018 Category: Anesthesiology Source Type: blogs
After Surgery in Germany, I Wanted Vicodin, Not Herbal Tea - The New York Times
MUNICH — I recently had a hysterectomy here in Munich, where we moved from California four years ago for my husband's job. Even though his job ended a year ago, we decided to stay while he tries to start a business. Thanks to the German health care system, our insurance remained in force. This, however, is not a story about the benefits of universal health care.Thanks to modern medicine, my hysterectomy was performed laparoscopically, without an overnight hospital stay. My only concern about this early release was pain management. The fibroids that necessitated the surgery were particularly large and painful, and the...
Source: Psychology of Pain - January 27, 2018 Category: Anesthesiology Source Type: blogs
