Feelings Aren’t Facts, or Are They? –
March 16, 2019 – With more than 47,000 Americans dying of opioid overdoses in 2017 and hundreds of thousands more addicted to them, it was recently reported that, for the first time, Americans were more likely to die of opioids than of car accidents.
This has forced many to take a step back and ponder the very nature of pain, to understand how best to alleviate it. Decades of research suggests that opiates provide little to no benefit for chronic non-cancer pain. One recent randomized trial of people with chronic joint and back pain showed that patients using opioids experienced slightly more pain compared with those using medications like acetaminophen and ibuprofen.
