“Pain Relief is an Essential Human Right”, We Should be Concerned about It

Abstract

Pain is a major public health issue throughout the world and represents a major clinical, social, and eco-nomic problem (1). The clinical, social, and economic costs of chronic pain in added health care costs, lost productivity, and lost income are significant, and if pro-longed, it can cause distress, anxiety, and suffering. The burden that pain can place on individuals and the huge costs that society must bear as a result clearly indicate the need for collective thinking through a decision-mak-ing process (2). Acute pain is a major challenge world-wide, and chronic pain poses a massive disease burden, affecting an estimated 20% of adults, rising to 50% of the older population. In addition, cancer-related pain affects 70% of the 10 million cancer patients who are diagnosed annually, which is expected to double by 2020 (3). On October 11, 2004, the Global Day Against Pain, access to pain relief was promoted as an essential human right by the IASP, WHO, and European Federation of IASP Chap-ters (EFIC) (4, 5). Human rights refer to the concept of a universal right, regardless of legal jurisdiction or other localizing factors, such as ethnicity, nationality, and sex. The UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights concep-tualizes human rights as based on inherent human dig-nity (3). Documents that were released at that time dem-onstrated that pain control has been a neglected area of governmental concern (6). There is a large and widening gap between the increasingly sophisticated knowledge of pain and its treatment and the effective application of that knowledge (7). Although the incidence of pain in de-veloping countries is higher and cost-effective methods for pain care are available, acute and chronic pain is un-dertreated, and timely access to care is a growing prob-lem in nations with access to the best health care (2, 8). Acute and chronic pain are often poorly managed for a wide variety of cultural, political, attitude-related, edu-cational, and logistical reasons (8). Under treatment of pain is a poor medical practice that results in many ad-verse effects (7). Improvements in clinical pain care have not matched advances in scientific knowledge, and inno-vations in medical education on pain are needed. Several lines of evidence indicate that pain education needs to address the affective and cognitive dimensions of pain (9). The practice of pain medicine is affected by many