Chronic pain is different from short-term or end-of-life pain. It can persist for years, even after the associated injury or condition has gone away. For some patients it can be burdensome, for others it can be debilitating. Chronic pain can also cause depression, anxiety, sleep disorders, and affect decision-making. it can't really be diagnosed, so it's difficult to come up with a precise number of people affected. But in 1999, the Society for Neuroscience estimated that as many as 100 million Americans will suffer from some sort of chronic pain. The National Center for Health Statistics puts the number closer to 75 million.
Despite the recent headlines about the rise in sales of prescription painkillers, chronic pain is still significantly under-treated in America. There are a number of reasons why. For one, there's no diagnostic test to diagnose pain, so doctors must rely on patient descriptions of what they're feeling. That can be tricky, because tolerance for pain varies widely from person to person. Culturally, pain has also long been viewed as something we encounter and endure as part of the human condition.
But the biggest barrier to effective pain treatment continues to be bad public policy, much of it driven by the war on drugs. Opioids -- morphine, oxycodone, methadone, and other drugs derived from the opium plant (or synthetically structured to mimic it) -- are the most effective way to treat severe and chronic pain.
