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

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

The Daily vor 1 Jahr

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46:15

Here’s a strange story: One day two summers ago, Jennifer Kahn
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.

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