A Pained Life: Build a Better Mousetrap
/By Carol Levy, PNN Columnist
I was watching an old TV series – “Diagnosis Murder” -- about a doctor who also solves mysteries. In one episode, Dr. Mark Sloan (Dick Van Dyke) was in a patient's room with her family. He told them their mother was in the early stages of Alzheimer's.
Her son asked, in a tremulous voice, “What can we do?”
Dr. Sloan smiles and said there was good news, along with the bad.
“It's a terrible disease, but on the positive side there are new drugs being developed all the time,” he said.
That got me mad. And it seemed as if every commercial I saw during and after the show was touting new medications, for everything from cancer to erectile dysfunction. Listening to them made me ever madder.
According to the National Cancer Institute, about 40% of us will be diagnosed with cancer at some point in our lives. Developing new cancer treatments, especially ones that are less harmful and painful to patients, is a necessity. After all, cancer kills.
Studies have found that erectile dysfunction affects about 18% of men. ED is a troublesome and embarrassing problem to have, but you won’t die from it.
Why do they spend so much time and money developing new drugs (and commercials) for medical conditions? Simple answer: the drugs make a lot of money for the pharmaceutical industry, even when a relatively small number of people may benefit from them.
Chronic pain may not kill in the typical sense, although many deaths can be traced back to poorly treated pain as an ancillary cause. According to a recent study, there are more new cases of chronic pain among U.S. adults than diabetes, depression and high blood pressure.
Given that the number of people with chronic pain is larger than many other conditions for which they are developing new drugs, why are we left out?
Many of us have had the experience of a doctor taking us off opioids or significantly reducing the dose, even when we’ve taken them safely and responsibly for years. The government has created fear among medical providers, especially those who specialize in pain management, making them uncomfortable prescribing opioids.
So, the question arises: Why isn't more being done to research and develop new non-opioid treatments for pain?
What comes to mind are mousetraps. Until they build a better mousetrap, until they create new and effective pain medications that are not opioid-based, we're stuck with what we have. Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to a pharmaceutical company's door.
There is big money to be made in finding new pain medications. And there are plenty of mice. Why not build a better mousetrap?
Carol Jay Levy has lived with trigeminal neuralgia, a chronic facial pain disorder, for over 30 years. She is the author of “A Pained Life, A Chronic Pain Journey.” Carol is the moderator of the Facebook support group “Women in Pain Awareness.” Her blog “The Pained Life” can be found here.
