Chronic Pain Light Therapy
New research shows that chronic pain light therapy may help.
Chronic pain afflicts over 100 million people across the United States. It diminishes their productivity and their quality of life and costs hundreds of billions of dollars each year to medically manage. It shatters people’s emotional wellbeing, tears apart families and claims lives through suicides and accidental drug overdoses.
But now researchers at the University of Arizona have found promise in a novel, non-pharmacological approach to managing chronic pain — treating it with green light-emitting diodes (LED).
“Chronic pain is a serious issue afflicting millions of people of all ages,” says Mohab Ibrahim, UA assistant professor of Anesthesiology and Pharmacology and lead author of the study. “Pain physicians are trained to manage chronic pain in several ways including medication and interventional procedures in a multimodal approach. Opioids, while having many benefits for managing pain, come with serious side effects. We need safer, effective and affordable approaches, used in conjunction with our current tools, to manage chronic pain. While the results of the green LED are still preliminary, it holds significant promise to manage some types of chronic pain.”
Source: Promise in light therapy to treat chronic pain — ScienceDaily
New Thinking
Chronic Pain Light Therapy is not necessarily new. However, pain management is a problem for nearly half the US population and opioids have created their own crisis. What is new is that the medical community has begun to embrace new therapies for chronic pain. We firmly believe in starting with less-invasive remedies (see our model for Holistic Health for more). The clinician can always move to more-invasive and riskier approaches. It is heartening that the CDC the American College of Physicians, and others have endorsed a “go slow” approach for pain management.
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