All over the planet people living with chronic pain are not receiving timely and appropriate treatment interventions for many reasons.  For some of these people it’s because they don’t have medical insurance or the ability to pay for the services they desperately need.  Others belong to managed care or HMOs that restrict services in what I consider a draconic fashion.  Still others may be victims of a workers compensation case and are presumed to be faking and trying to defraud the system.

I believe that healthcare services and especially chronic pain management should be a right not a privilege.  On October 11, 2004 during the Global Day Against Pain the World Heath Organization (WHO) and the International Association for the Study of pain (IASP) along with many other organizations issued a joint declaration stating that The Treatment of Pain Should be a Human Right.  These organizations released research documents that showed that the management of pain has been a neglected area of many governments in the developed nations despite the fact that cost-effective methods of pain control are readily available.

The IASP recently released the results of a systematic review of the literature regarding the relationship between waiting times, health status and health outcomes for patients awaiting treatment for chronic pain. Twenty-four studies met the inclusion criteria for the review. Despite the differences across studies, the results of the systematic review indicate that waits of 6 months and over for treatment for chronic pain are associated with deterioration in health related quality of life and psychological well being including an increase in depression scores.

The IASP report recommended that measures should be taken to ensure that waitlists for chronic pain treatment should be no longer than 6 months as the evidence supports a deterioration in health related quality of life and psychological well being by that time. Studies should be undertaken to determine at what stage health related quality of life begins to deteriorate while waiting and assure that patients do not wait longer than this for appropriate treatment. It is unknown whether waiting for treatment for chronic pain has an impact on health outcomes and studies designed to answer this question are needed.

To learn more about my views on the right to chronic pain management, please read my article The Right to Quality Chronic Pain Management that you can download for free on our Ariticles page.

You can learn more about the Addiction-Free Pain Management® System at our website www.addiction-free.com. If you are living with chronic pain, especially if you’re in recovery or believe you may have a medication problem and want to learn how to develop a plan for managing your pain and medication effectively, please go to our Publications page and check out my book the Addiction-Free Pain Management® Recovery Guide: Managing Pain and Medication in Recovery. To purchase this book please Click Here.

To listen to a radio interview I did conducted by Mary Woods for her program One Hour at a Time please Click Here to go to this interview.

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.