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Can chronic pain treatment benefit from a public health perspective?
Posted by The Pump Handle on December 5, 2012 “If you really look at how pain affects people and what it means to have pain…you start to view it more as a social phenomenon.” These are words from Dr. Daniel Carr, who says the time for a population-based approach doesn’t begin with misuse and abuse of prescription painkillers; it begins, in fact, with how we interpret the contributors to pain in the first place.
Public health takes on the opioid abuse and overdose problem, building on strengths as conveners, educators
Posted by The Pump Handle on November 30, 2012 A decade ago, only about 10 percent of the patients at Cincinnati’s Center for Chemical Addictions Treatment were admitted for opioid addiction and abuse. During the treatment center’s last fiscal year, that number was up to 64 percent. The numbers reflect a startling trend in Ohio and throughout the nation — a trend that public health workers are taking to task.
New study highlights need for workplace interventions that reduce depression risk
Posted by The Pump Handle on November 26, 2012 Exploring reliable links between work and depression, which is a significant health and economic burden for individuals as well as society, is somewhat murky. But a new study published in the American Journal of Public Health used two analytic strategies to address such criticism.
Physicians take lead role in confronting opioid misuse, but still face hurdles
Posted by The Pump Handle on November 16, 2012 Since 2000, overdose deaths due to prescription painkillers in Utah have increased by more than 400 percent. By 2006, more Utahans were losing their lives to prescription drug overdoses than to motor vehicle crashes. For Dr. Lynn Webster, a longtime pain management physician, the startling numbers were a call to action.
Chronic pain patients caught in the middle of growing opioid abuse problem
Posted by The Pump Handle on November 9, 2012 It took six years of going from doctor to doctor to doctor for Penney Cowan to finally receive a diagnosis for her chronic pain: fibromyalgia. Doctors had told her she’d just have to learn to live with the pain — a condition that some days made it hard to lift a cup of coffee. So when she decided to join the pain program at Ohio’s Cleveland Clinic, she didn’t have high hopes. She says she expected the effort to fail.
Public Health Classics: Assessing air pollution and health in six U.S. cities, researchers’ findings changed the air we breathe
Posted by Celeste Monforton, DrPH, MPH of George Washington University School of Public Health & Health Services on November 2, 2012 In the 1974, most of us thought that air pollution was something that just looked and smelled bad. But public health researchers had just launched a study to determine whether air pollution shortened people’s lives. Twenty years later they published their results. It forever changed the way we think about and address air pollutants.
Report illustrates worrisome trend of painkiller abuse among injured workers
Posted by The Pump Handle on October 12, 2012 Researchers studying workers’ compensation claims have found that almost one in 12 injured workers who begin using opioids were still using the prescription drugs three to six months later. It’s a trend that, not surprisingly, can lead to addiction, increased disability and more work loss – but few doctors are acting to prevent it.
Inequality, stress, and health: The Whitehall Studies
Posted by The Pump Handle on October 3, 2012 Two landmark studies among civil servants in England helped public health researchers develop a nuanced perspective on the relationship between socioeconomic position and health.
New study sheds light on the health effects of job insecurity
Posted by The Pump Handle on September 28, 2012 It’s not news that unemployment is bad for a person’s health. But it turns out that just the threat of unemployment is bad as well.
Optimism and the HIV/AIDS epidemic
Posted by The Pump Handle on September 18, 2012 Recent biomedical advances in AIDS research have allowed political figures such as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to proclaim that the phenomenon of a generation without HIV/AIDS is within reach. But how well-founded is this optimism?