The Pain Pod Chronic Pain Association of Canada

Lately we're hearing a lot about so-called "central sensitization" of the nervous system as an explanation for chronic pain. Is it real? Is it an excuse to keep people in pain away from treatments like opioids, or even to blame us for our pain? Today, Dr Andrea Trescot joins us from Jacksonville, Florida, with the 411. As past president of the American Society of Interventional Pain Physicians, past pain fellowship director at the Universities of Florida and Washington, and now CMO of Stimwave, a wireless stimulation company, Dr Trescot takes pain pretty seriously. While she continues to see patients in Florida and Alaska, she never stops speaking and writing about pain treatment. Dr Trescot has written 150+ articles and edited three textbooks about it, and, for patients, has co-authored PainWise: A Patient’s Guide to Pain Management.

Autoimmune disorders are complex, plentiful, often painful, and not well-understood. Maybe you've heard lately that "the body can't attack itself"? Wrong. Our inflammatory mechanisms—our bodies' built-in protections against disease—can go haywire and hurt us, with the disruption manifesting in at least eighty different disorders so far. Today we talk about the inflammatory process and its remedies with the renowned American pain specialist Lynn Webster. Board-certified in anaesthesiology and pain medicine and noted for his advocacy and compassion, Dr Webster has published widely on pain and its best treatments. We discuss interventions like diet and new drug therapies, and where sufferers can turn for help.

Should Canadians care that the US Centers for Disease Control is revising its 2016 guideline for prescribing opioids for pain? That's the question we put to Barry Ulmer, the long-time head of the Chronic Pain Association of Canada. Listen up! In 2017, we found out the hard way that when it comes to "the war on drugs," what happens in the US doesn't stay in the US. With Canada's patients and doctors in the crosshairs again, the CDC is now taking comments on its final draft. Find out how to make your voice heard.

Noted U.S. patient advocate Richard "Red" Lawhern tells us all that's wrong with the CDC's rewrite of its disastrous 2016 opiate prescribing guideline, just out for comment. According to Red, who's slogged through all 211 pages of what he calls this new "little shop of horrors," the rewrite will hurt even more patients than the original did—and even more doctors, too. Patients' needs, clinicians' expertise, scientific evidence:  these still go unconsidered, as if the prescribing catastrophe of the last five years never happened, never mind the wreckage it's caused on both sides of the border.

If you identify as female and a patient, you've come up against preferential treatment—where men are preferred over women by clinicians (both male and female) and by the medical system itself. We speak about the age-old and still very current tradition of medical misogyny with the young woman who created The Happy Pelvis, and who's long experienced it herself. She tells us how her health has been harmed by misogyny, what clinicians actually say to their women patients, and how even you can hope for a Happy Pelvis and indeed a healthy body, despite the odds.

Dr Josh Bloom, known for his witty and acerbic commentary on what's wrong with and even downright stupid about a lot of "science-based" policy, is the Director of Chemical and Pharmaceutical Science at the American Council on Science and Health in New York. Josh has a PhD in organic chemistry, and no patience at all for the ongoing, supposedly evidence-based crackdown on prescribed opioids. He talks to us about how the facts of pharmaceutical pain relievers are distorted at the get-go by the very words policymakers and the media use to discuss them.