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Health

Viewing chronic pain as its own illness is providing better treatments

Doctors are starting to see chronic pain as a condition in its own right, which is leading to new and more effective treatment options

By Lucia Osborne-Crowley

16 November 2022

Person suffering from headache. Migraine. Light sensitivity.

Basak Gurbuz Derman/Getty

WHEN pain lasts for three months or longer, it is classified as chronic, a condition that affects .

Chronic pain was long believed to be a stubborn version of acute pain – which passes in less than three months once the damage is healed – and it was treated in much the same way. Yet an increasing body of research has led doctors to believe that chronic pain should be treated as a disease in its own right, rather than an enduring symptom of tissue damage or physical trauma. This could have major implications for the treatment…

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