Giving Compass' Take:
- Bert Gambini synthesizes the results of a new study that reveals that the long-standing and under-acknowledged problem of chronic pain for Americans is getting substantially worse.
- How can our healthcare system best serve people experiencing chronic pain? How do marginalized communities have more difficulty receiving equal treatment in our healthcare system?
- Read about what COVID-19 means for people with chronic pain.
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The findings, published in the journal Demography, suggest blanket increases across multiple measures, with pain rising in every adult age group, in every demographic group, and at every site of pain for which data exists.
People today experience more pain than people of the same age in earlier decades. In fact, each subsequent birth group is in greater pain than the one that came before it.
“We looked at the data from every available perspective including age, gender, race, ethnicity, education, and income, but the results were always the same: There was an increase in pain no matter how we classified the population,” says coauthor Hanna Grol-Prokopczyk, associate professor of sociology in the University at Buffalo.
“You might think that with medical advances we’d be getting healthier and experiencing less pain, but the data strongly suggest the exact opposite,” Grol-Prokopczyk says.
Read the full article about chronic pain by Bert Gambini at Futurity.