Voices of Chronic Pain

A national study was recently performed by the American Pain Foundation and was sponsored by Endo Pharmaceuticals to see the ways that chronic pain affects the sufferer’s life. The results were published in May of 2006. I actually participated in the survey, and wasn’t very surprised at the results, but others in the public may be shocked to see the actual extent of the impact this disability has on our lives.

A little over half (51%) of the survey’s respondents said that they feel they have little or no control over their pain. Also, 96 percent said that controlling their breakthrough pain (pain that is above their constant pain levels; for me, this type of pain is caused by picking something up that I shouldn’t have, driving for an extended period of time, and everything that going to school entails, including the drive, sitting in classes, and moving between classes carrying weight on my back.) was important or very important to them, but the results show that this type of pain is too often under-treated by doctors so “the typical chronic pain patient using opioids to control their pain experiences breakthrough pain or severe flares about twice each day, or 14.53 times each week.”

More than three quarters of chronic pain patients said that they feel depressed, have trouble concentrating, and that their energy levels have been affected because of their pain. Depression is very common in chronic pain patients. I haven’t been off of an anti-depressant for more than about a year in the past four years. As soon as our pain increases or something else is taken away from us because of the pain, our depression inevitably spikes. Someone once told me that all chronic pain patients have to grieve over the loss of their lives because their lives are gone. Our lives are nothing like they were before this happened to us and we have to realize that we will never be that person again. It’s hard to say the very least. Our lives now begin as soon as the pain started because we changed so utterly that there’s not a single piece of our lives that hasn’t been affected by the pain. It’s hard to work through, but if a chronic pain patient doesn’t, they will never be able to move on to dealing with the pain instead of wallowing in it.

Some people have questioned the validity and applicability of the results because a pharmaceutical company sponsored the study. They say that the only reason they were willing to finance the study was because they could use the results in future marketing campaigns and commercials to specifically target chronic pain sufferers. However, I disagree. I think that the results of the study show, without question, that chronic pain negatively impacts almost every facet of our lives. These results can be used to promote better understanding about what this disability really is about. Many people underestimate exactly how hard this life is, or refuse to believe that anyone could really survive a life like this without going insane, or being completely dependent on others, or even kill themselves because of the constant, unending pain.

My biggest hope with these results is that they can help lead to more research that looks at ways to help us deal with the pain more effectively and even lead to the development of new and better pain medications that will treat the pain and help reduce the amount of suffering we have to go through because of our disability.

Voices of Chronic Pain Survey Results