Chronic Pain in the World

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Food and Drug Administration is reconsidering whether doctors who prescribe painkillers like OxyContin should be required to take safety training courses, according to federal documents...

If the rumors that Prince died from an overdose of Percocet are ultimately confirmed, it will put a very common conclusion to the life of an extraordinarily talented man who had so much more to give...

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Fourteen people in the Sacramento, California, area have fatally overdosed on a pill disguised as a popular painkiller, and now the drug has turned up in the San Francisco Bay Area...

CBS News spent several weeks embedded with first responders in Plymouth, Massachusetts to shed light on America's growing opioid epidemic.

Last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told doctors they should really, really think twice before prescribing opioids for chronic pain.

And now the doctors are telling us that meditation and cognitive behavioral therapy often work better than pain meds and other medical treatments for chronic back pain.

Federal health officials speaking in unusually blunt terms Tuesday called on the American medical community to turn away from treating common ailments with highly addictive painkillers, saying the nation’s prescription drug epidemic was a “doctor-driven” crisis.

It's no secret that heroin use is hitting record numbers in the US.

For journalist Erin Marie Daly, that fact became disturbingly real in 2009 when her 20-year-old brother, Pat, died of a heroin overdose.

"Please, I need my Oxycodone!" my patient, M, pleaded with me.

My eyes met his. I observed every fleeting facial expression, hoping to gauge his intentions. The discussion about whether to continue to prescribe this medication was one I'd had too many times with too many patients over the past few months.

Addicted to prescription painkillers after a high-school sports injury, Cameron Burke moved on to heroin, which was cheaper and more easily accessible. His parents tried everything, more than once sending him out of state for treatment.

In just a year, overdose deaths from opioid painkillers and heroin jumped 14%, hitting record levels in 2014, according to a new Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report released Friday.

1. We often hear “you don’t look sick” but the truth is that most of us try very hard to pass as normal. We rest before going out and take our pain meds at the optimal time. At times we hurt so much and are tired from trying to play healthy that we feel like laying down right then and there, but we (usually) hold it in until we get home to our beds.

I want to propose a radical shift to how we approach treating chronic pain. In very basic terms, I suggest that we redirect treatment toward remodeling the brain as opposed to just focusing our attentions and therapies on painful body parts like the back or neck. In other words, we need to go top down instead of bottom up. 

“Complainer.” “Pretending.” “Lazy.” “Unproductive.”

It’s not right, but for many people with chronic pain, being slapped with an unfair label is not exactly uncommon. After all, there are a lot of misconceptions about chronic pain — sufferers know this more than anyone. And according to the results from a new survey from Yahoo Health and Silver Hill Hospital, at least half of chronic pain sufferers polled believe others associate the above words with those who have unrelenting pain.