five years ago, jen was happy and successful. today, she is living a life dominated by pain. opioid patches, anti inflammatories, nerve pain medications. it started with back pain but eventually spread through her body. mid december, i drove to work, and whilst i was driving, the pain through my back and right leg wasjust something i had neverfelt. it was how i would imagine being kicked in the back by a horse would be. that really acute, direct force. and nowjust a walk to the shops is an endurance test. i know look terrible, ifeel terrible, but good days of having a full face of makeup on to go anywhere are long gone.
is anything between 20% and 50% in the uk and we know that it s massive. but while it s an issue affecting millions of people, chris says the mechanism of how persistent pain works is not well understood. for example, if we have pain in our knee, the senses in our knee may be sending normal information to our nervous system. that data reaches the spinal cord and the spinal cord will do what it wants to do on that signal, and it may boost the signal, and it depends largely then on the decision making process to turn that into a threat signal or a normal signal. and a normal signal will feel like there is a normal thing, but a threat signal, the best way our brain knows to get our attention is to flag that with pain. chronic pain can be extremely debilitating, fatiguing and agonising. chronic pain has made me feel different. - i feeljudged. i feel misunderstood. i feel isolated. i feel so guilty for not being able to work, for not
managing her pain. the aim was to raise awareness that we can change the way we think and talk about pain, to live with it rather than be ruled by it. there s a massive misunderstanding of pain. we think hurt equals harm, and of course, persistent pain is very different. and it is basically the brain s become confused, and it s giving you pain where it s no longer necessary. but knowing that pain, persistent pain is very different and very complex, means you actually have the ability to change it yourself. and that is actually enormously empowering. also there, dr chris barker, reflecting that for many opioids and other drugs still play a very important role in helping them cope. i think the issue of opioid use is massive, both for clinical and for the individual who is on opioids, from those two perspectives. from the person on opioids it is a very real thing, and if i was on opioids
and then it decreases and i feel so much better each time. and i think that one of the things that would help is for medicine to be a little bit more supportive and a little bit more humble about the way they treat people in withdrawal because we aren t the ones writing those prescriptions. they are. gps argue that access to treatments and therapies that offer an alternative to medication are patchy. in the meantime, for some patients, painkillers are the only thing that brings immediate relief. but for lorraine, that relief from pain meant she lost a decade of her life. its relentless nature in her arms, legs and neck, captured in her diary. it became a little bit too much to keep writing this down because every day just seemed the same. she also knows the fear of feeling she was dependent on prescription
0ur survey suggested that of those living with chronic pain, 23% were on a waiting list for either pain management clinic or surgery. dr barker s clinic is one of relatively few specialist centres dealing with chronic pain. chris leads a team of physiotherapists, psychologists, pharmacists helping people better manage their pain. it s started easing off a little bit. - focusing notjust on the physical causes, but also on how the brain interprets and reacts to pain. trying to keep an open mind. i think the understanding we have of pain will take a long time to filter through, and attitudes will change as well, i think, when we understand that pain is something that is modifiable, and we can make changes to it, and we can be empowered to do those kind of things. it may not completely get rid of pain, but when we understand how to deal with this in a different way, i think