The Sunday Read: ‘Chronic Pain Is a Hidden Epidemic. It’s Time for a Revolution.’

The Daily

The New York Times

Daily News, News

4.4 • 102.1K Ratings

🗓️ 2 February 2025

⏱️ 46 minutes

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Summary

Here’s a strange story: One day two summers ago, Jennifer Khan woke up because her arms, — both of them — hurt. Not the way they do when you’ve slept in a funny position, but as if the tendons in her forearms and hands were moving through mud. What felt like sharp electric shocks kept sparking in her fingers and sometimes up the inside of her biceps and across her chest. Holding anything was excruciating: a cup, a toothbrush, her phone. Even doing nothing was miserable. It hurt when she sat with her hands in her lap, when she stood, when she lay flat on the bed or on her side. The slightest pressure — a bedsheet, a watch band, a bra strap — was intolerable. Our understanding of pain, and especially chronic pain, is far behind where it should be. We don’t know what causes a person with an injury to develop chronic pain, or why it happens in some people and not others, or why it happens more often in women. At a genetic and cellular level, we don’t know which systems get out of whack, or why, or how to fix them.

Transcript

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0:00.0	I used to think of pain as something that you got over.
0:10.9	I did a lot of sports for most of my life, and so I've sprained my ankle pretty badly.
0:15.8	I dislocated a shoulder, broke my hand.
0:19.7	Sometimes it hurt for weeks or for months. But, you know, I would take
0:23.6	some Advil or do some physical therapy and eventually the pain would go away. Until one day,
0:31.4	a couple of years ago, it didn't.
0:42.2	My name's Jennifer Kahn, and I am a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine.
0:47.7	I write about the complex ways that science and new technologies affect people.
0:52.3	And in the past, those stories weren't personal.
0:59.9	This time was a little different. I was shocked to learn that until recently, it had been more than 20 years since a new pain drug was approved, at least one that
1:06.9	was not an opioid. And I learned this because I developed chronic pain myself.
1:15.4	Once I did, I realized there were so many people out there who are in the same position.
1:21.9	And for those people, pain is with them all the time.
1:26.0	And it makes it difficult to do almost anything, to work, to exercise, to see your friends, even just to enjoy life. And learning that sent me on a reporting journey that you'll hear about in this week's Sunday read. As many as one in three Americans have chronic pain or have dealt with it at some point in
1:48.4	their lives.
1:49.7	But there are still only a handful of treatment options available.
1:53.7	There are opioids, there are anti-inflammatories, certain drugs for nerve pain maybe,
1:58.9	but not all of them work well.
2:01.6	And because there's no way for even an expert to see pain, it's not always taken seriously.
2:07.9	Even doctors might say to you, well, maybe it's all in your head.
2:12.0	Or honestly, it's probably not that bad, right?
2:15.8	In my case, for instance, I can feel electric sparks in my hands
	...

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