Painâ€"it is the most common complaint presented to physicians. Yet pain is subjectiveâ€"it cannot be measured directly and is difficult to validate. Evaluating claims based on pain poses major problems for the Social Security Administration (SSA) and other disability insurers. This volume covers the epidemiology and physiology of pain; psychosocial contributions to pain and illness behavior; promising ways of assessing and measuring chronic pain and dysfunction; clinical aspects of prevention, diagnosis, treatment, and rehabilitation; and how the SSA's benefit structure and administrative procedures may affect pain complaints.

Drug overdose, driven largely by overdose related to the use of opioids, is now the leading cause of unintentional injury death in the United States. The ongoing opioid crisis lies at the intersection of two public health challenges: reducing the burden of suffering from pain and containing the rising toll of the harms that can arise from the use of opioid medications. Chronic pain and opioid use disorder both represent complex human conditions affecting millions of Americans and causing untold disability and loss of function. In the context of the growing opioid problem, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) launched an Opioids Action Plan in early 2016. As part of this plan, the FDA asked the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to convene a committee to update the state of the science on pain research, care, and education and to identify actions the FDA and others can take to respond to the opioid epidemic, with a particular focus on informing FDA's development of a formal method for incorporating individual and societal considerations into its risk-benefit framework for opioid approval and monitoring.

This is the first volume on the subject of the alleviation of world suffering. At the same time it is also the first book framing the fields of global socio-economic development, world health, human rights, peace studies, sustainability, and poverty within the challenge of alleviating suffering and improving quality of life. Both international studies and global development have become specialized and fragmented, whereas this work assembles all of these development fragments together in order to determine whether common ground exists to make headway in reducing global suffering. Leading experts in these various fields of development and suffering have been recruited worldwide to give scholarly assessments of the major human problems and how they can be successfully tackled.

"An attempt to give readers in one volume a speaking acquaintance with the great legal philosophers of the ages"--Preface

Chronic pain costs the nation up to $635 billion each year in medical treatment and lost productivity. The 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act required the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to enlist the Institute of Medicine (IOM) in examining pain as a public health problem. In this report, the IOM offers a blueprint for action in transforming prevention, care, education, and research, with the goal of providing relief for people with pain in America. To reach the vast multitude of people with various types of pain, the nation must adopt a population-level prevention and management strategy. The IOM recommends that HHS develop a comprehensive plan with specific goals, actions, and timeframes. Better data are needed to help shape efforts, especially on the groups of people currently underdiagnosed and undertreated, and the IOM encourages federal and state agencies and private organizations to accelerate the collection of data on pain incidence, prevalence, and treatments. Because pain varies from patient to patient, healthcare providers should increasingly aim at tailoring pain care to each person's experience, and self-management of pain should be promoted. In addition, because there are major gaps in knowledge about pain across health care and society alike, the IOM recommends that federal agencies and other stakeholders redesign education programs to bridge these gaps. Pain is a major driver for visits to physicians, a major reason for taking medications, a major cause of disability, and a key factor in quality of life and productivity. Given the burden of pain in human lives, dollars, and social consequences, relieving pain should be a national priority.