Rheumatic Pain Article

I was searching for an article that I downloaded in a .pdf format last year and found this wonderful article. It's a little old, published in the April 2005 issue of the Journal of Arthritis & Rheumatism, but I thought it gave an excellent explanation of all the processes involved in pain. It also gets into the processes involved in turning regular pain into chronic pain.

What really caught my eye was this statement, in the section regarding the treatment of the pain.
"To date, pharmacologic treatments, such as simple analgesics and nonsteroidal antiinflammatory drugs, have been the main focus of rheumatology pain management. Rheumatologists, in general, are not experienced in the management of chronic pain beyond this simple paradigm."

This is exactly why I think it's so important that those of us suffering with joint/back pain that is not being effectively treated by our Rheumies or Orthos need to seek help from a qualified Pain Mgmt Doc.

The article is a little technical and filled with all sorts of medical jargon, but it's quite good.

I don't really understand what happened, but I got into the full article last night and early this morning. Ducky, on the Arthritis Forum got into it too and hten suddenly, neither of us could access it. I poked around and found that although it sayd you can purchase the full article for $25, you can also do a free registration to access it. The whole process takes less than 3 minutes and it's really worth it.

For anyone who can't access it, or does not want to register, I am working on converting it into a text file. Fell free to email me.

 Awww shucks BaseballMom, you've made me blush! LOL

I do a lot of research and poking around looking for info and when I find something good, I feel like I have to share it because we all know that in a 10 minute MD appt, we don't get much real info. Even great Docs who want to help us and make an effort to do so, just don't have the time to impart detailed info like this. Ain't no point in keeping it to myself, so I share it. I just hope this helps someone, anyone, to get a better idea of how the pain pathways work and the mechanisms involved in turning regular pain into chronic pain.