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One in five Canadians suffers from some form of chronic pain. After cardiovascular disease, chronic pain and related disability has the biggest financial impact on our society due to direct medical costs and lost productivity in the workplace.
Traditionally, pain has been viewed as a symptom of underlying disease that will end after healing takes place. We now know that when pain persists, that physiological changes occur in the central nervous system. These together with psychological factors, transform the symptom of pain into the disease of chronic pain. When this occurs a patient’s quality of life gradually decreases as they slide into a “chronic pain spiral”.
Such painful conditions can include: headaches, arthritis, low back pain, facial pain, neck and shoulder pain, post-surgical pain, orofacial pain, neuropathic pain and fibromyalgia.
Traditional medical approaches to these conditions may fail to remedy the problem because the pain has become “programmed” into the spinal cord and brain. Often, in desperation, pain sufferers look for relief from many sources both traditional and alternative, a process that may be frustrating as well as costly.
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