Chronic pain? Watch posture, Vit D and obesity, say doctors
A study found that 36.7% of the above-45 and below-60-years population experience chronic pain due to lifestyle habits
Bad posture, lack of Vitamin D, obesity, and ageing can be the cause of chronic pain in adults, say pain physicians.
Apart from intractable pain experienced by terminally ill patients, a majority of the chronic pain patients come under the non-malignant category, with most of them suffering severe back pain.
A study published by the International Institute of Population Sciences in Mumbai stated that 36.7% of the above-45 and below-60-years population experience chronic pain due to lifestyle habits, and that number rises to 46% when speaking of the above-60-years population in India.
Pain physician at Ram Manohar Lohia Institute of Medical Sciences, in-charge of the state-of-the-art Pain Clinic and MIPSI (Minimally Invasive Pain and Spinal Intervention) lab, Dr Anurag Agarwal predicted, “As average lifetimes of individuals gets longer, the number of adults suffering chronic pain will also increase.”
He elaborated, “IT professionals aged 25 to 35 years are overwhelmingly developing neck, shoulder, back and upper arm pains,” he said. “They are sitting slouched for 10-12 hours in a day, and due to a lack of sunlight, are developing deficiencies in Vitamin D as well, which makes the bones and joints weaker.”
Speaking of the Pain Clinic run by RMLIMS, he said, “Only about 20% of our patients are dealing with pains due to malignant health concerns, a large majority of our patients belong to the non-malignant category,” he said.
He advised that at least 10 minutes of sun exposure several times a week, and 25-30 minutes of physical activity daily is essential for all adults to maintain basic health and avoid chronic pains.
Further, non-malignant back pain is recurring. Pain physicians agree that it is difficult to identify this pain in MRIs, and therefore tough to diagnose. Sporadic and varied medication from different doctors leads to the pain returning. Also, the pain returns after a few months, when the medicine stops, because the lifestyle at the helm of it has not been corrected.
Dr Agarwal said, “Advanced interventions in doctors’ practices will ultimately improve the patients’ outcome and quality of life.”
Listing the requirement of pain management studies across disciplines, Dr Anil Gupta, head of the department, physical medicine and rehabilitation and in-charge of pain medicine at King George’s Medical University, said, “Regenerative medicine and rehabilitation have become imperative in physiatry, anaesthesiology, orthopaedics, sports medicine, radiology, oncology, and a number of other fields of medical study.”
“As for people older than 35 - 40 years, joints begin to degenerate due to deficiencies of important vitamins. The vertebrae will start to degenerate, as well as knee joints,” said Dr Agarwal. “Moreover, while both older men and women used to have more active lifestyles managing the household, having househelps removes the requirement for most physical activity,” he explained.
“Similarly for those struggling with obesity, there is increased load on all their joints,” he added, especially in their back and ankles.
The Pain Clinic at RMLIMS runs on Tuesdays and Thursdays, with a majority of the non-malignant patients having body pains as a result of unfavourable lifestyles.
Dr Gupta said, “There is much scope for improvement in the pain relief and rehabilitation discipline, and much catching up to do to reach best global standards, which can only happen through exchange of ideas and academic discussions with experts.”
Dr Agarwal said that while the Indian Society for Study of Pain has 2,500 pain physicians, “but given the scale of the problem, ideally we need 2 lakh,” he said.
