Over the past few months, the federal government has mobilized against what is being called “the opioid crisis“: a national epidemic of fatal overdoses that in 2014 claimed more than 14,000 lives, the most ever recorded. Since most of these opioids were originally prescribed by physicians to treat pain, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently finalized a guideline containing recommendations for appropriate opioid prescribing.
The Food and Drug Administration will require that all opioid-containing medications be labeled with a new boxed warning about “the serious risks of misuse, abuse, addiction, overdose and death” associated with these drugs. And the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health has released a National Pain Strategy that is designed to complement restrictions on opioids by promoting and reducing access barriers to non-pharmacologic management options for patients with chronic pain.
What is notably missing from these efforts is an attempt to understand why more people are experiencing chronic pain in the first place. In a recent article published in the Harvard Business Review, public policy and business professors Eileen Chou, Bidhan Parmar, and Adam Galinsky reviewed studies that linked widening U.S. income inequality and unemployment to greater levels of physical pain and purchases of over-the-counter painkillers. They also demonstrated in a series of experiments on college students that the prospect of economic insecurity increased the perception of pain and reduced pain tolerance. Chou and colleagues wrote:
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