ADRSupport Community - Spinal Injury Foundation News 4

I copied and pasted this from a newsletter I receive. Interesting facts from the Spinal Injury Foundation.

A Pain In The Wallet

Low back pain is very expensive. In a recent study enacted in 1998, the cost was 90 billion dollars, or 1% of the U.S. GDP. Think about it for a moment, we have a disease that costs society 90 billion dollars and yet this news story never made the evening news. What if this problem were an infectious disease? What if there were a cold like syndrome (like the bird flu that is all over the news) that left 50% of those who contracted it with debilitating low back pain? This new infectious disease would be all over every newspaper, television, and internet site. The National Institutes of Health would earmark billions for research. Dozens of patient groups would spring up and storm Washington for answers. Drug companies would set up huge teams of scientists to find a cure.

The reality is that we have a huge mismatch. We have a disease that costs more than almost any other single health problem in the U.S., yet the training of our doctors is focused elsewhere. For every other major health issue (heart disease, diabetes, and smoking related illnesses) there are gobs spent on research. We know many of these diseases inside and out. We have worked out their mechanisms and at least know how to prevent them. However, for low back pain, this hasnt been done; from a research perspective, we're still stumbling around in the dark.

The good news is that the drug companies have finally started to notice that the medical treatment of pain is a multibillion dollar industry waiting to be tapped. I cant say that I'm all that comfortable with their first major forage into this new territory (long acting, high dose opiods such as Oxycontin); however, it's a start. On the bright side, for the first time we now have researchers who are devoting their entire careers to pain research. In addition, JCAHO (Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations) has declared that patients in pain need real attention and that pain is the fourth clinical sign.

Where do we go from here? We still have a long way to go. In 1999, 41% of patients in chronic pain said that their pain was out of control. We need to change the medical education system and place a goal that in 10 years, every major medical school in the U.S. will have a pain medicine curriculum. From there, the rest will follow.

Christopher J. Centeno, M.D.

Stem Cells in Your Future?

There are phenomenal advances in stem cell research. Many people mistakenly believe that you have to destroy embryos to produce stem cells. The truth is they can be created by our own bone marrow. These cells can now mature into tissue capable of producing ligaments, Disk material and even new bone. The Spinal Injury Foundation is sponsoring clinical trials using stem cells .