Canadians Living With Chronic Pain

Last month I was in Calgary, Canada, and I was glad to see the Calgary Herald giving attention to chronic pain conditions.  Although more attention could have been given to migraine and headache disorders (I’m not biased or anything), I appreciated the fact that pain was recognized as a major challenge.

Here are some quotes from the first article in the series.  To read the whole article, click the link below.

One in five Canadians – roughly six million people – is living with chronic pain of some kind, sometimes as a result of trauma or illness, and sometimes for no obvious reason at all.

Doctors who treat patients living in pain say that any wait for care beyond six months is medically unacceptable, because early intervention can keep lives from turning into train wrecks. Uncontrolled pain can cost people their jobs, careers, homes, marriages, friends and sense of identity. People, including young mothers – and the burden of pain is greater for women than for men -lose the ability to take care of their families. Constant severe pain deadens personalities. Looking in the mirror, Heshusius said she sometimes hardly recognizes herself. "Who is she?" she wonders.

Pain is demoralizing and isolating. It can destroy people financially. People unable to work lose their benefits; they lose fights with insurance companies and workers’ compensation.

The instinct is to retreat, to curl up and wait for the torment to stop. People living with chronic pain are twice as likely to suffer major depression as people living without pain.

Does this sound familiar?

Experts blame the meagre training health professionals receive on assessing and managing pain (a survey of 10 major Canadian universities found that veterinary medicine students receive, on average, 87 hours of mandatory training in pain, versus 16 hours, on average, for medical students); inadequate funding for research (just one-quarter of one per cent cent of all federal dollars for health research in Canada go to pain); a health system that doesn’t compensate doctors for the time it takes to provide meaningful pain care ("we take up too much time," pain patients say over and over again), stigmatization and attitudes toward people with pain and a strong reluctance to prescribe opioids for chronic non-cancer pain.

So patients struggle to find doctors to help them, leaving the burden of care to fall on over-stretched pain clinics and the small number of community doctors willing to help. People with pain describe being treated like street addicts when they land in emergency rooms in a pain attack so severe they can barely put one foot in front of the other.

Lous Heshusius says what’s needed is a sea change in society’s mindset about pain.

"There is so much in society that works against pain relief, against us getting help – structural problems, political problems, funding problems."

We live in a society that says only that which can be seen and measured is true and valid and real, she says, "and I think that is doing us in."

She says she can’t count the times she has heard, "But you look fine." Or, "Can’t you take some pain pills for that? People have no idea what kind of lives we live."

Read the full article:  Canadians living with agony of chronic pain (sorry! The article is no longer available.)