Anyone who's experienced or knows someone who has experienced chronic pain appreciates how desperately the world needs a major breakthrough in this arena. Pain management has evolved, there are steady improvements, but unfortunately a lot of people are effectively left behind and the choice becomes a series of profoundly mind-altering drugs... or profoundly mind-altering pain. The way that pain can erode your personality and your life is hard to express quickly in words, but it's both invisible and endlessly corrosive.
I certainly hope that this or another path of research leads to a new generation of therapies that don't depend on opioids and are more effective than current alternatives.
Yup. Treatment these days for chronic and severe pain amounts to your choice of:
1) Ever escalating doses of NSAIDs / acetaminophen and the associated long term health effects of that.
2) Long term opioid management which will leave you treated like a drug seeker by anyone who isn’t your pain doctor and may or may not also require long term escalation and has its own health concerns and complicates your use of other medications. And god help you if you don’t like your pain doctor because changing them is a whole different world of suspicion and poor treatment.
3) Various physical interventions like nerve ablations or back surgery or steroid injections which come with a host of other risks and also tend to be both expensive and temporary.
I’d love an alternative to gabapentin while accepting that it is what keeps me functional enough to be functional, it is for me a remarkable treatment except for the side effects.
The company I work at does spinal cord stimulation for chronic pain patients. The stories of the patients are just gut wrenching. Chronic pain is just horrible and very hard to understand and treat.
I certainly hope that this or another path of research leads to a new generation of therapies that don't depend on opioids and are more effective than current alternatives.