20% of Americans Have Chronic Pain According To A Recent CDC Report.

Chronic pain affected about 20% of U.S. adults in 2016 and high-impact chronic pain — severe enough to interfere with life or work activities most days affected 8%, according to the CDC.

CDC researchers defined chronic pain as pain on most days or every day in the past 6 months, and ‘high impact’ chronic pain as chronic pain that reduced life or work activities on most days or every day during the past 6 months.

This means 50 million people in the US are suffering with chronic pain.

About 20 million people suffer with more severe chronic pain that interferes with their lives, work, and day to day activities

Chronic pain costs an estimated $560 billion each year in health care costs, lost productivity, and disability programs.

This is a massive cost money-wise… but a much greater cost to every person that continues suffering with chronic pain, most of which is musculoskeletal related.

Chronic pain doesn’t really have any specific group that it attacks. It can happen to anyone.

Although it is more common in older individuals because they have had the problems for longer and due to some other complex factors.

They suffer at a time when they may have already put in their time working and have retired. Yet after working their lives, they suffer daily with chronic pain that interferes with what they had wanted to do in retirement.

Chronic pain also tends to effect women more than men.

It effects lower income people more than higher income people. This seems to occur for a variety of complex reasons including likely a history of higher manual labor jobs that pay less and create more stress on the body. Other factors contribute as well.

Chronic Pain Treatment

This is the biggest problem.

What is commonly being done to help people suffering with chronic pain isn’t working.

If it were, 50 million Americans would not still be suffering. Clearly, it’s not effective.

The common route for people is to take various pain relieving medications that are slowly added to over the years, even though they’re not working.

This has led to the massive opiod epidemic that has caused even more suffering and death.

Other treatments commonly used are pain management, steroid injections, and surgeries. Chiropractic has been shown to significantly reduce the number of surgeries.

All these treatments can help people.

The problem is that they generally do not change what caused the problem to begin with which is generally an injury followed by poor healing and abnormal movement patterns afterwards which when coupled with the neurological changes increase pain.

Plus it makes sense to start with the treatment that is likely to help and has the least potential for harm, chiropractic

If you suffer with pain or chronic pain in the Texarkana area and would like to see Dr. Hagebusch, give us a call.

We’re here to help you like we’ve helped thousands of other Texarkana area residents recover from injuries, pain, and get back to living a happier, healthy, active life!

Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report
Source Reference: Dahlhamer J, et al “Prevalence of chronic pain and high-impact chronic pain among adults — United States, 2016” MMWR 2018; 67(36): 1001-1006.

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/67/wr/mm6736a2.htm

https://www.medpagetoday.com/neurology/painmanagement/75078