Pain Facts & Stats

Last Updated: Sept. 1, 2003

How Pain "Works"
You probably learned the "telephone switchboard" story of pain in school. Touch a hot stove, the story goes, and a signal races from your finger along your spinal cord to your brain. Your brain perceives the danger and dispatches an urgent message to your hand. You yank your hand away.

Scientists now say pain is more complex than that. It's more like the Internet than an old-fashioned switchboard. A single stimulus may prompt multiple signals throughout the body. The pain you feel reflects an interaction between your basic cellular and genetic makeup, your current health, your emotional state, the situation in which the pain occurs, your past encounters with pain, and what you know and think about pain.

Pain is Prevalent

• More than 50 million Americans live with chronic pain caused by various diseases or disorders, and each year nearly 25 million people suffer with acute pain as a result of injury or surgery.
• Nine in ten Americans suffered from regular pain (89% reported they have some sort of pain on a monthly or more often basis).
• Although the medical knowledge and technology is now available to relieve or greatly ease most pain, most pain goes untreated, undertreated, or improperly treated.
• People do not realize that pain is not something they "just have to live with," even though treatments are available to lessen most types of pain. And, in fact, if untreated, pain can make other health problems worse.
• Four in five Americans believed aches and pains were a part of getting older and 64 percent would only see a doctor when they could not stand the pain any longer. Sixty percent said that pain was something you just have to live with, and 55% said they were uncomfortable taking medications.
• Pain causes the majority of pain sufferers (68%) to feel anxious, irritable, or depressed.
• More than half of those with pain say that their pain interferes with their ability to sleep.
• Forty percent of those with pain say that their pain interferes with their productivity and ability to work.

Source: The American Pain Foundation

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