Chronic pain: emerging treatment options for patients after the opioid crisis – podcast

(The Conversation is an independent and nonprofit source of news, analysis and commentary from academic experts.)

Amanda Mascarelli, The Conversation; Gemma Ware, The Conversation, and Katie Flood, The Conversation

(THE CONVERSATION) Chronic pain affects hundreds of millions of people around the world. But the opioid crisis in North America led many health care providers to realize they relied too heavily on drugs to help patients manage their pain.

In this episode of The Conversation Weekly podcast, a pain management specialist discusses new developments in pain treatment and why there’s hope for patients with chronic pain.

Amanda Mascarelli, senior health and medicine editor for The Conversation in the U.S., began researching chronic pain management after her mother fell and severely fractured her leg. After her first prosthetic procedure failed and she was living in excruciating pain, a high-profile orthopedic surgeon told her mother she might be better off enduring the pain rather than going through another major operation due to her age and other risks. “I just couldn’t accept that in this day and age there wasn’t something more that they could do for my mom to ease her pain,” she recalls.

One of the people Mascarelli...