No one Likes pain. There are countless causes of pain in our lives, from trauma to cancer. In particular, as we enter an aging society, awareness and pursuit of pain and quality of life have become higher than before. So we use various methods to get rid of the pain.
Complex regional pain syndrome, a disease called CRPS (CRPS) for short, may sound unfamiliar, but more people have recently known about the disease as patients suffering from the disease have been introduced through media such as TV and the Internet since a few years ago. CRPS is a rare and intractable disease characterized by extreme chronic neuropathic pain in certain body parts, accompanying autonomic nervous system dysfunction, two-positive changes in skin, fur, and hand claws, and motor/sensory dysfunction. It is known that about 26 people per 100,000 people develop the disease, and it is reported that there are about 10,000 patients in Korea.
The cause and pathophysiology are very complicated, individual differences are severe, and although it is not yet clear, it is known to occur mainly after trauma. The patient is diagnosed according to the CRPS diagnostic criteria after confirming the doctor's clinical symptoms and conducting objective tests. Patients often have difficulties in their daily lives because they complain of unpredictable extreme pain, which leads to psychological atrophy and often complain of accompanying symptoms such as depression. Therefore, early treatment is recommended to prevent chronicization and intractable conditions, although it has not yet been scientifically proven. It is trying to control pain through various methods such as drug treatment, including narcotic painkillers and neuralgia, invasive methods such as sympathetic nerve block, and fluid treatment, but the treatment effect varies greatly from patient to patient. However, in general, the use of painkillers, including narcotics, is often almost essential to reduce sudden pain.
The word drug is perceived very negatively by the public. Recently, there have been a lot of news and articles about the wrong prescription and misuse of narcotic analgesics, including fentanyl patches, and this seems to be instilling more negative perceptions in people. The problem is that a small number of people who misuse drugs and the media's provocative reporting cause people to suffer like CRPS patients. CRPS patients often carry narcotic painkillers and live their daily lives due to sudden pain. Without medicine, there are many restrictions on daily life due to anxiety that pain will come when. The fact that you can collapse due to severe pain that comes suddenly while walking on the street, eating, does not easily reach us, not patients. The problem is that due to recent issues such as fentanyl patches, narcotic painkillers have not been prescribed up to the original prescribed dose. It is essential to know that there are people around us who suffer from pain and are anxious every day, such as CRPS patients, and that even their daily lives are threatened by the wrong prescriptions and use of drugs.
Drugs and narcotic painkillers are not the same word. Narcotic painkillers can be used safely if they keep their dosage and usage as well as drug work that cannot be easily prescribed or prescribed. It seems that it is time for the medical community and society to make overall efforts, such as understanding patients, sufficient education on narcotic painkillers, improving awareness, prescribing standards, and reporting through accurate information from the media.
Writer: Yeyoung Jeon
(Picture form Unsplash)
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