Pain is probably the oldest problem in medicine. It’s the way our bodies tell us that something is wrong here.
But pain has long been considered a symptom. So when medicine can’t find what’s wrong, or when medicine can’t fix the pain, well, that’s usually the end of the story. And that’s left a lot of people with chronic pain suffering in silence.
In this episode, we learn why pain is one of the great mysteries of medicine - one of the most challenging conditions to diagnose, to measure, and to treat successfully.
We explore why the worthy effort to bring pain into the light inadvertently created what may be the most devastating social crisis (ahem, opioid epidemic) of the last century.
And we look at a new pain medicine - Journavx - which is not approved for chronic pain (yet) but has a lot of people hoping for a path to peace without addiction.
