Chronic pain affects 1 in 6 people in the United States and around the world, and is the most common cause of disability. Yet medicine’s desperate attempts to treat chronic pain sparked the opioid epidemic. And while many promising non-opioid therapies exist, some of them newly developed, patients face innumerable barriers in accessing them.
To overcome the opioid epidemic, it is not enough to just reduce how many opioids physicians prescribe. We need to be able to offer patients evidence-based alternatives. Yet for that to happen, we must also better understand the fundamental nature of chronic pain, which is as much an emotion we feel in our minds as it is a physical sensation experienced by our body.
Acceptance and commitment therapy and exercise are both safer and more effective for chronic pain than opioids, which can actually increase how much those with chronic pain hurt.
