A detailed guide to Rheumatoid Arthritis, exploring its symptoms, causes, diagnosis, and effective treatments to manage joint inflammation and improve quality of life.
Chronic pain is often the after-effect of degeneration, injury, or illness. Part of the body is left damaged somehow, and that damage causes pain. Most pain therapies concentrate on controlling the pain with medications, injections, or devices that block pain signals in one way or another. However, an emerging type of therapy may actually be able to slow or reverse the tissue damage that’s often to blame for chronic pain. Regenerative therapy encourages the body…
The most common way to control pain is with oral medications, such as non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (nsaids) or opioids. Some people don’t respond to these medications, though, while others are unable to tolerate oral pain medications. Nerve blocks are another way of treating pain with medication, but nerve blocks are injected, which increases efficacy and reduces the likelihood of other side effects. Nerve block injections allow the delivery of pain-relieving medication directly to the location…
A herniated disc is one of the most painful, debilitating lower back pain conditions. The pain caused by herniated disc is different for each person who experiences it and can even change as the condition progresses. Because this condition can be unpredictable, a herniated disc treatment that works can also vary from person to person. Here’s how to treat a herniated disc. What is a herniated disc? The spine consists of 33 individual vertebrae, each stacked…
Breaking the Cycle of Appointment Fatigue in Chronic Pain Management Living with chronic pain means navigating a constant balancing act—managing symptoms, medications, work, relationships, and self-care. At the core of this juggling act lies an unspoken burden many patients face: appointment fatigue. This term refers to the emotional, mental, and physical exhaustion that comes from attending endless medical appointments, undergoing tests, meeting new specialists, and often, repeating the same explanations of symptoms without seeing long-term…
Emotional: a word used often nowadays to insult someone for their sensitivity towards a multitude of things. If you cry happy tears, you’re emotional. If you express (even if it’s in a healthy way) that something is bothering you, you’re sensitive. If your hormones are in a funk and you just happen to be sad one day, you’re emotional AND sensitive. Let me tell you something that goes against everything people have probably ever told you.…
Are you experiencing constant muscle pain and fatigue? There is a good chance that you are suffering from fibromyalgia. As many as 5 million Americans that are aged 18 or older are affected by it. Women are the primary targets of this chronic disease, affecting up to 90% of them, and it’s very hard to treat. For many years, research has pointed to this pain and fatigue just being “in the patient’s head.” It’s been…
The opioid crisis has revealed another real ongoing problem: a lot of people have chronic pain. For example, Lady Gaga recently revealed that she suffers from fibromyalgia, a chronic pain condition that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says afflicts 4 million people (or 2% of the adult population). This number may actually be an underestimate because determining the real number of people that have fibromyalgia can be a pain. Fibromyalgia is frequently underdiagnosed…
People with hidden disabilities could soon be entitled to blue badge parking permits under Department for Transport (DfT) plans. The Government said the proposals would make it easier for people with conditions such as dementia, Fibromyalgia, Lupus, and autism to travel to work, socialize, and access shops and services. It is hoped the move – which would be the biggest change to the blue badge scheme since it was introduced in 1970 – would help…
It’s a trickle at present, but the conversation around chronic pain between doctors and patients is no longer one way only. Over the past few months, the constant messaging suggesting chronic pain patients are dying in dramatically increasing numbers because of opioid overdoses has been questioned. Understand, the messaging was indeed clever. Chronic pain patients weren’t directly and specifically named, but the messaging caused listeners and readers to believe it was pain patients whose lives…
Another study is raising questions about the safety of the anti-seizure drug gabapentin, especially when it’s taken with opioid pain medication. According to research published online in PLOS Medicine, combining gabapentin with opioid painkillers is associated with a significantly higher risk of dying from an opioid overdose than opioid use alone. “Clinicians should consider carefully whether to continue prescribing this combination of products and when deemed necessary, should closely monitor their patients and adjust opioid dose accordingly,” wrote…