According to the Ohio State University Medical Center chronic pain has been said to be the most costly health problem in US. Increased medical expenses, lost income, lost productivity, compensation payments, and legal charges are some of the negative economic consequences of chronic pain. Consider the following:

Low back pain is one of the most significant health problems. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 70 percent to 85 percent of all people have back pain at some time in their life. Back pain is the most frequent cause of activity limitation in people younger than 45 years old.

Cancer pain affects the majority of patients in intermediate or advanced stages of cancer. About 1.4 million new cases of cancer are diagnosed each year in the US.

Arthritis pain affects nearly 47 million Americans each year.

Headaches, according to the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), affect millions of US adults. The three most common types of chronic headaches are migraines, cluster headaches, and tension headaches.

Other pain disorders such as the neuralgias and neuropathies that affect nerves throughout the body, pain due to damage to the central nervous system (the brain and spinal cord), as well as pain where no physical cause can be found - psychogenic pain - increase the total number of reported cases.

According to US News & World Report (February 2009) chronic pain is a problem that—when healthcare, lost income, and lost productivity are taken into account—is estimated to cost over $100 billion in the United States each year. More than a quarter of Americans age 20 or older, or about 76.5 million people, say they’ve experienced pain that lasted longer than 24 hours, according to the American Pain Foundation—and 42 percent have endured pain lasting longer than a year.

This high cost is why effective chronic pain management is so important.  What further complicates pain management is the presence of coexisting disorders including addiction.  These conditions cause even more of an over-utilization of the healthcare system.  That is one of the many reasons I developed the Addiction-Free Pain Management® System—a multidisciplinary team approach that address the chronic pain condition and any coexisting disorders.

Learn more about the importance of using a team approach by reading my article The Need for Multidisciplinary Chronic Pain Management that you can download for free on our Article page.

You can learn about the Addiction-Free Pain Management® System at our website www.addiction-free.com. If you are working with people undergoing chronic pain management and want to learn how to develop a plan for managing their chronic pain and coexisting psychological disorders; including depression, addiction and other coexisting psychological disorders effectively; please consider my book Managing Pain and Coexisting Disorders: Using the Addiction-Free Pain Management® System. To purchase this book please Click Here.

To read the latest issue of Chronic Pain Solutions Newsletter please click here. If you want to sign up for the newsletter, please click here and input your name and email address. You will then recieve an autoresponse email that you need to reply to in order to finalize enrollment.

To see an online overview of Cognit delivering Addiction-Free Pain Management® please go to this Link for a free demo.

To learn about my upcoming trainings you can check out our Calendar page.