Editorial June 23, 2003 Issue

Hope for the healing of pain

Editor

A Newsweek magazine cover story — "Treating Pain" — caught our attention recently. Millions of people around the world suffer from chronic or acute pain. In the US alone, Newsweek reports (May 19, 2003), the annual cost of treatment for pain (not including the value of lost-work time and diminished productivity) is about $100 billion.

But much closer to home, most of us either know someone who is dealing with pain, or we're facing it ourselves in some form.

Newsweek's writers posed two key questions. Claudia Kalb's article asks, "Why do we hurt?" and catalogs the currently accepted biological causes of pain. Kalb notes that "patients are demanding that pain be seen as a condition unto itself, not just a byproduct of injury or illness."

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