We are witnessing widespread abuse of legal, prescribed drugs that, while structurally similar to illicit opioids such as heroin, are used for sound medical practices. So how did we get here?
Pelvic inflammatory disease’s traumatic consequences are unmatched by the low level of awareness around it. Left untreated, it can cause chronic pelvic pain, ectopic pregnancy and infertility.
Unexplained, chronic pain known as fibromyalgia affects up to 5% of the population. Yet there are no effective treatment options for the millions for whom each day begins with persistent pain.
Pain management is one of the most neglected aspects of health care; our failure to adequately address chronic pain is a major driver of its economic and social burden.
We’ve learned a lot about how music can help with pain and a score of other clinical problems. But with chronic pain affecting a quarter of us, it’s an area that has received too little attention.
Nearly every second person in the world had a headache at least once in the past year. But these can feel very different, depending on which of the nearly 200 types of headache you have.
One in five of us has been experiencing chronic pain over the past three months, or longer. Chronic pain won’t kill us; it just makes our lives miserable. More miserable, research suggests, than for example…
Chronic pain, defined as disabling pain that persists despite attempts at treatment and often without obvious cause, has become a serious challenge for health professionals. It is not surprising that someone…
Almost all of us have either had it, or can look forward to getting it in our lifetime. In fact, somewhere between about a tenth to a third of us have back pain right now. So is back pain just something…
Pain is one of the most powerful weapons of war. Western Front soldier and poet Siegfried Sassoon dubbed war a “sausage machine” because it tore through and crushed tissues and organs, and dismembered…
Repetitive strain injury, or RSI, is a term which was developed to describe an epidemic of work-related arm and hand pain reported in Australia in the 1980s. While work-related arm and hand pain was and…
We now know that there’s much more to pain than simply what is happening in the painful body part, and attention has turned to the role of the brain. But not even this mysterious organ can tell us everything…
The use of opioid medication in Australia has grown considerably in the past 20 years, and so have related harms. This increase in use is primarily for chronic pain conditions, now the most common reason…
It’s long been a household debate: who really is the stronger sex, men or women? It’s no secret that physically, men often outperform women. But women have long argued that the gruelling experiences of…
A protein found in centipede venom could be developed into a drug to treat chronic pain that is as effective as morphine but without the side effects, researchers say. The joint Australian-Chinese study…
Changing the way people think and move can have a huge impact on their experience of unexplained lower back pain, a study has found. The new findings, published in the European Journal of Pain, show that…