116 MILLION IN PAIN. For real?

"Put chronic pain behind you, use our hypnosis tapes."
"A revolutionary method for stopping chronic pain."
"A solution to chronic pain?: Can an all-natural dietary supplement from tobacco plants help ease your pain?"
Excedrin ad for migraine medicine. "These things are for real."

I look at these fake promises and the ad starts to make sense to me.

I know many people do not believe there is a real thing such as chronic intractable pain. Why should they?

Studies, the most recent that 116 million people have chronic pain relies on self-reporting and includes pain within the last 12 months from anything including headaches, arthritis, back pain; entities that we all have have at one time or another. What does arthritis, for instance, or rheumatism mean?

I do not mean to discount the normal pain discomforts and outright pain of life. But a diagnosed disorder, with specific diagnostic criterion, is very different then when someone personally assigns a name to their pain.

I would like to see a study where they study the numbers of those with the disorders where pain is the sole or main complaint. These are different, at least to me, then a more generalized count of all who say they are in pain.

When statistics are printed in the media about the numbers of those with diabetes or cancer or other diseases, those reports are believed. Everyone knows what those names mean. The term chronic pain has come to mean everything from a sprained ankle if the pain lasts for 12 weeks or longer, to the pain of CRPS, trigeminal neuralgia and others.

For sure, those of us who live with intractable pain would like to have a 'revolutionary method for stopping chronic pain" or an hypnosis tape that would end our suffering (as a hypnotherapist it kind of kills me to lump this in). A plant that has curative properties, boy wouldn't that be wonderful?

Our pain is real. It needs real answers and not false promises. It is easier to offer these things when too many people think the disease is also a fake.

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"Goals of the study were to determine the prevalence by age and gender of common chronic pain conditions (headache, back or neck pain, arthritis or joint pain, and others), plus their association with both depressive and anxiety disorders." http://updates.pain-topics.org/2011/11/many-readers-have-questioned-latest.html