The Pain Relief Network

Sep 4, 2010

By Charlie Fidelman, Montreal Gazette

MONTREAL — About 80 per cent of people with chronic pain do not get adequate relief and are suffering needlessly throughout the world, a leading pain authority said Friday.

“This has gone on for too long. Pain has been regarded as a simple problem. It must be recognized as a disease in its own right,” said Australian anesthesiologist Michael Cousins, the driving force behind the first International Pain Summit, held in Montreal at the 13th World Congress on Pain.

The economic fallout from not treating pain in Australia alone is enormous, about $34 billion a year in health-care costs and work days lost, said Cousins, director of the Pain Management Research Institute in Sydney. He helped draft Australia’s national pain management strategy in March.

One in five people suffers pain that lingers beyond three months, and a third of them are disabled “as badly as people with heart failure,” said Cousins who also chaired the international steering committee drafting the Montreal Declaration on pain, aimed at bringing attention to inadequate pain policies worldwide.

Issued by delegates from 84 countries, the declaration says that proper pain treatment is a fundamental human right.

It also calls on governments and health-care institutions to establish laws, policies and systems that will help promote access to pain management.

“About 70 per cent of children in the terminal phase of life with cancer had severe unrelieved symptoms and severe pain,” Cousins said, citing studies in Australia and the United States. “That’s a shocking statistic for a so-called civilized society. It’s disgraceful. It’s cruel and inhuman.”

The World Health Organization estimates that billions of people live in countries with low or no access to pain medication. Part of the problem is a lack of resources for assessment and treatment options, Cousins said.

“There’s a year wait to get into my pain clinic and it’s three years for migraine headache sufferers. Some commit suicide,” he said.

Patients should be believed when they complain of chronic pain, Cousins said. Primary care doctors need more training at the undergraduate level and countries need more pain medicine specialists, he added.

Veterinarians get three times more pain training than doctors, he said.

The Montreal guidelines will provide a framework that can be used in any country, he said. “To treat pain properly, you need to apply all the resources now being applied to chronic diseases.”

http://www.canada.com/business/Treat+pain+disease+expert+says/3478695/story.html