Author Archives: PainRelief.com

Chronic Multifocal Pain Linked to Accelerated Cognitive Decline

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PainRelief.com Interview with:
Yiheng Tu
CAS Key Laboratory of Mental Health
Institute of Psychology
Chinese Academy of Sciences
Department of Psychology
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences
Beijing, China

PainRelief.com: What is the background for this study?

Response: Chronic pain (CP) is a leading source of disability worldwide. Multisite chronic pain, where pain is experienced in multiple anatomical locations, affects almost half of chronic pain patients and has been found to have a greater burden on patients’ overall health. However, However, it has not been clear whether people with multisite chronic pain suffered from aggravated neurocognitive abnormalities.

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Review of Non-Opioid Pain Medications for Back Pain Relief

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PainRelief.com Interview with:
Filippo Migliorini MD, PhD, MBA
Department of Orthopedic, Trauma, and Reconstructive Surgery
RWTH University Hospital of Aachen

Dr. Migliorini

PainRelief.com: What is the background for this study?

Response: Acute low back pain imposes a significant socioeconomic burden worldwide. The pharmacological management of acute low back pain aims to restore daily activities and improve the quality of life. No magic bullet exists: interventions to reduce pain and disability are available, but long-term results are unpredictable. This is often hard to accept for clinicians and patients and provides fertile soil to quacks, faith healers, and gurus to promote miraculous non-evidence-based solutions. Education in this regard needs to improve.

Acute low back pain management is not well codified and extremely heterogeneous, and residual symptoms are common. Depending on the individual severity, pharmacological management may range from nonopioid to opioid analgesics. The literature regarding the best non-opioid pharmacological management of acute low back pain is limited, and the indications available in the literature are conflicting. Our investigation aimed to systematically review the level I evidence on the administration of myorelaxants, nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, and paracetamol in patients with low back pain.  

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Painful Bunions: Risk Factors for Failure of Corrective Surgery

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Dr. Johnson

PainRelief.com Interview with:
Matthew Johnson, D.P.M.
Assistant Professor
Department of Orthopaedic Surgery
University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center

PainRelief.com: What is the background for this study?

Response: There is a paucity of literature attempting to characterize risk factors for nonunion of the Lapidus bunionectomy.

PainRelief.com: Would you briefly describe what is meant by a bunion?

Bunion with cornDermNet NZ image

Response: Bunions are a chronic painful bump that forms on the base of the big toe when the long metatarsal bone shifts toward the inside of the foot and the phalanx bones of the big toe angle toward the second toe.



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Both High and Low Dose Exercise Beneficial for Knee Osteoarthritis

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PainRelief.com Interview with:
Tom Arild Torstensen
Department of Neurobiology, Care Sciences and Society
Division of Physiotherapy, Karolinska Institutet, Huddinge, Sweden, and
Holten Institute, Stockholm, Sweden 

Tom Arild Torstensen

PainRelief.com: What are the main findings?
Response: The results from our study (1) show that both high-dose and low-dose exercise therapy is beneficial for knee osteoarthritis. At a glance, it would be natural to think that I should choose a low-dose because it takes only 30 minutes and consists of 5 different exercises compared to the high-dose lasting 70 to 90 minutes consisting of 11 exercises. But because our study was designed as a superiority trial, meaning that even though we failed to show that high-dose treatment is superior to low-dose, our results do not imply that a low-dose exercise regimen is as beneficial as a high-dose regimen. 

Both groups improved over time, but there were no benefits of high-dose therapy in most comparisons. One exception was the KOOS score function in sports and recreation, where high-dose therapy was superior at the end of treatment and the 6-month follow-up. A small benefit in QoL at 6 months was also observed. Notably, most variables numerically favored the high-dose group, albeit not in a statistically or clinically meaningful way.

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Twin Study Finds Cannabis Legalization Did Not Cause Substantial Psychological Harm in Adults

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PainRelief.com Interview with:
Stephanie Zellers PhD
Postdoctoral Researcher, Kaprio Group, FIMM
Dr. Zellers began this research as a graduate student at the
University of Colorado Boulder’s Institute for Behavioral Genetics (IBG)

Dr. Zellers PhD

PainRelief.com: What is the background for this study?

Response: Proponents and opponents of cannabis legalization respectively cite various potential benefits and harms that these policies may cause. Many studies have evaluated these outcomes, but drawing causal conclusions is challenging due to the many confounds that may better explain observed effects.

 We investigated the effects of cannabis legalization on a broad range of psychological outcomes, like substance use, psychiatric symptoms, general functioning in daily life, and cognitive ability. We used a longitudinal twin sample with twin pairs living in different types of states (recreationally legal vs. recreationally illegal) to draw causally informative conclusions. Because identical twins share 100% of their genes, as well as environmental factors like the family rearing, SES, and community norms, co-twin control studies can rule out many alternative explanations for an observed relationship.

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Effect of Arthritis on Employment Varies Among Socioeconomic Groups

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PainRelief.com Interview with:
Adam Martin PhD
Academic Unit of Health Economics and
Edward Webb, PhD Economist
University of Leeds, UK

PainRelief.com: What is the background for this study?

Response: We wanted to find out how arthritis affects people’s employment. We expected that some people with arthritis might experience poorer work outcomes than those without the condition, such as by losing their job or having a slower career progression.  This study set out to find out how large the differences in work outcomes were for people living with arthritis, and if particular age groups or genders doing specific jobs were especially at risk.

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Bisexuals Found to Use More and Varied Cannabis Products

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PainRelief.com Interview with:
Carrie Cuttler, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
The Health & Cognition (THC) Lab
Department of Psychology
Washington State University

Dr. Cuttler

PainRelief.com: What is the background for this study?

Response: While we know that sexual minorities (such as gay, lesbian, bisexual, etc.) individuals use many substances, including cannabis, more than heterosexual individuals, we don’t know very much about patterns of sexual minorities’ cannabis use or why sexual minorities are motivated to use cannabis. We also don’t know as much as we should about how cannabis use is related to mental health among sexual minorities. Our study used data from Project ART (Addictions Research Team) to examine these questions. The data were collected from 10 different universities across the United States, and we included data from almost 5,000 young adults (aged 18-30) in this study. People answered questions about their cannabis use, motivations for using cannabis, mental health symptoms, and also indicated their sexual attraction on a scale. The majority of our sample identified their sexual attraction as exclusively heterosexual, a small number indicated exclusively same-sex attraction, and almost a quarter indicated that their sexual attraction was somewhere between those two (the group classified as bisexual).

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Acupuncture During Gynecology Cancer Surgery Reduced Post-Op Pain

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PainRelief.com Interview with:
Prof. Eran Ben-Arye MD
Co-founder and director of the Unit of Complementary and Traditional Medicine
Department of Family Medicine, Haifa
Director of the Integrative Oncology Program within the Haifa and Western Galilee Oncology Service, Lin Medical Center, Clalit Health Services
Chairperson of the Israel Society for Complementary Medicine of the Israel Medical Association

Prof. Ben-Arye

PainRelief.com: What is the background for this study?

Response: The study was part of an initiative whose stated goal was providing continuity of integrative oncology care to patients with gynecology cancer. Over the past 14 years we have been offering patients undergoing chemotherapy with integrative oncology treatments without charge, helping improve their quality of life and increasing their adherence to the conventional oncology treatment protocol.

The research presented in the current paper examined the introduction of the integrative treatment from as early as the time of cancer diagnosis and throughout the pre-surgical, surgical and post-surgical inpatient setting.
The integrative process was a collaborative effort, taking place together with a team of surgeons, anesthesiologists and nurses throughout all stages of peri-operative care of the gynecology oncology patient. 

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Medical Clowns Help Patients Deal With Emotional and Physical Pain

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PainRelief.com Interview with:
Orit Karnieli-Miller, PhD
Associate Professor
Head of the Department of Medical Education,
Sackler Faculty of Medicine, Tel Aviv University, Israel

Dr. Karnieli-Miller

PainRelief.com: What is the background for this study?

Response: In recent years Medical clowns have been more and more integrated into hospitals. Still, there needs to be more understanding of their roles, therapeutic goals, and skills. This understanding is necessary both to help professionalize medical clowning and train them and allow other health professionals to work well with them.

To do this, we systematically analyzed medical clowns’ skills within three typical challenging encounters: with an adolescent who is in pain, not willing to do recommended treatment exercise; with an adolescent and a physiotherapist in a painful treatment session; and with a mother of a sick child.

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State Opioid Prescribing Limits Did Little to Reduce Length of Dental Prescriptions

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PainRelief.com Interview with:
Kao-Ping Chua, MD, PhD
Susan B. Meister Child Health Evaluation and Research Center
Department of Pediatrics, University of Michigan Medical School
Ann Arbor MI 48109.

Kao-Ping Chua
Dr. Kao-Ping Chua

PainRelief.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?

Response: U.S. dentists account for approximately 11 million opioid prescriptions each year. Excessive opioid prescriptions from dentists can result in leftover opioids that can be diverted or misused. In part to prevent this, most states enacted policies between 2016 and 2018 that restricted the duration of opioid prescriptions for acute pain, such as dental pain.

The objective of this study was to evaluate whether these state opioid prescribing limits were associated with reductions in the duration of opioid prescriptions from dentists. Using national prescription dispensing data from 2014-2020 and a rigorous quasi-experimental study design, we found that this duration did not change after limit enactment. A likely explanation is that most limits allow up to a 7-day supply of opioids, but the typical duration of dental opioid prescriptions during the study period was about a 3-day supply. For this reason, state limits had little ability to reduce this duration in the first place.

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