Chronic pain affects hundreds of millions of people around the world. But the opioid crisis in North America led many health care providers to realize they relied too heavily on drugs to help patients manage their pain.

In this episode of The Conversation Weekly podcast, a pain management specialist discusses new developments in pain treatment and why there’s hope for patients with chronic pain.

Amanda Mascarelli, senior health and medicine editor for The Conversation in the U.S., began researching chronic pain management after her mother fell and severely fractured her leg. After her first prosthetic procedure failed and she was living in excruciating pain, a high-profile orthopedic surgeon told her mother she might be better off enduring the pain rather than going through another major operation due to her age and other risks. “I just couldn’t accept that in this day and age there wasn’t something more that they could do for my mom to ease her pain,” she recalls.

One of the people Mascarelli reached out to as she sought advice for her mother was Rachael Rzasa Lynn, an associate professor of anesthesiology at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. Rzasa Lynn specializes in helping patients manage chronic pain, or pain that lasts longer than three months.

Rzasa Lynn explains the pain management tools she can offer patients include both long-recognized remedies such as physical therapy, medication and surgery, as well some new methods like neuromodulation, where an electrical device is implanted in a patient’s body to change the type of signals flowing through a particular nerve.

Another new method Rzasa Lynn may recommend to patients is pain reprocessing therapy, a behavioral approach to eliminating pain. This therapy entails guiding patients in doing painful movements while helping them to reevaluate the sensations they experience. She explains that this helps to:

Retrain the brain and start to rewire some of these nociplastic pathways that have developed that lead to pain that doesn’t really have a good reason for being there.

Still, Rzasa Lynn acknowledges that this trial-and-error approach can be difficult for patients, and she hopes that further research will allow clinicians to more easily determine what treatments will be effective for their patients.

The holy grail of pain medicine is trying to figure out which patients with the same condition are going to respond to the same treatment, because we can have two people with very apparently similar conditions, and yet their pain experience is completely different and their response to treatments is completely different. My number one hope for the future of pain medicine is that we have a better way of predicting who is going to respond to a particular treatment the first time.

Listen to the full interview between Amanda Mascarelli and Rachael Rzasa Lynn on The Conversation Weekly podcast.

Disclosure statement: Rachael Rzasa Lynn receives funding from the National Institutes of Health, Department of Defense, Institute of Cannabis Research at Colorado State University - Pueblo. She is on the board of the Colorado Pain Society.

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A transcript of this episode is available on Apple Podcasts.

This episode of The Conversation Weekly was written and produced by Katie Flood with assistance from Mend Mariwany. Sound design was by Eloise Stevens and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl.

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