Calmare Therapeutics Inc (fka CTTC)

[powderbum]

How much is it worth to be out of pain?

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/8/10/16118620/how-much-is-pain-worth

The US needs new ways to treat pain
In the 1990s, drug companies pushed doctors to take pain seriously. The result was a drug epidemic. America is awash in opioids; the standard daily dose per million people is 50,000 doses of opioids. That’s far more than any other developed country in the world.

In a recent survey, 38 percent of the US population reported using prescription opioids for pain — compared to just 4.5 percent in Germany. And America’s costly pain problem has led to an even deadlier one: the addiction crisis. The death toll is continuing to rise as people who became hooked on addictive prescription opioids move to heroin and deadlier synthetic opioids like fentanyl.

On top of that, using opioids to treat chronic pain may have been largely ineffective. There’s a new body of research that shows chronic opioid use can actually make pain worse, and favors simpler methods like exercise, yoga, acupuncture, and anti-inflammatory medication.

In response to the crisis, medical groups and the federal government are starting to emphasize controlling pain rather than eliminating it entirely. The federal government’s evaluation of hospitals, for example, will no longer grade them on how much they’ve reduced their patients’ pain.

These changes are controversial. Getting more precise about how pain affects people’s lives — including the difference between mild and severe pain — can give policymakers more tools as they consider them.