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Chronic Pain : Heart Disease And Cancer

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When most people think of severe illnesses, examples such as diabetes, heart disease and cancer are considered the most devastating, with high death tolls and great negative impacts on families and individual’s quality of life. The media reinforces the idea of these as conditions that cause the greatest degree of suffering through movies and television shows dealing with the effects of these diseases, as depicted in the compilation “Top 6 Movies about Cancer” (Twin TV, 2016) and including the multiple Oscar-winning “Terms of Endearment” (Brooks, 1983) and others; in addition, media fund raisers and advertising raise awareness of these illnesses. Yet there is one condition that is more prevalent than these three put together, but often overlooked considering the havoc it wreaks on nearly one-sixth of the world’s population: chronic pain (Axiom, 2016). Chronic pain sufferers number more than 1.5 billion individuals throughout the globe, and one-third of people in the United States, around 100 million, live in a state of chronic pain. Often their conditions do not seem as urgent or serious to others as do cancer or other potentially fatal illnesses. People with chronic pain may not show visible symptoms and their suffering is often silent, or attributed to other causes. Nevertheless, according to the Institute of Medicine, the cost of chronic pain just in the United States goes far beyond the individual suffering of its victims; in 2011, it estimated that medication and

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