As of Jan. 1 of this year, medical facilities risk losing their accreditation if their doctors and nurses don't assess a patient's pain regularly, just the way they record other vital signs, and then control that pain to the best of their ability. But not only will these standards help patients be more comfortable, pain researchers know that patients recover much faster if they are in little or no pain. Nerves can become damaged, causing the spinal cord to literally rewire itself. It then sends false signals to the brain that there is pain, even after there shouldn't be. That is why stopping the pain before that process can begin is so crucial.
Chronic pain is the hardest to treat.
But at places like the University of California-San Francisco Pain Management Center, pain specialists go a long way to making it bearable. Doctors like Pamela Palmer use an arsenal of weapons to fight intractable pain. They know how pain can ruin a person's life, and they will do anything and everything they can, not to cure it, but to keep it under control. UCSF also has a Pain Clinical Research Center where Dr. Michael Rowbotham and his colleagues head up several pain research studies. Since nerve damage pain rarely responds to opiodes like morphine, researchers hope that by finding some answers to the causes of shingles pain, they may have answers to other nerve damage pain, and some alternative drugs to treat them.