Raising Awareness For Chronic Pain!!

Back for another post! Actually by the time that you start reading this I'll be sitting back relaxing at our cottage on the lake. Actually there will be a whole lot of leaves that need to be taken care of seeing as we are well into fall and the cold and snowy winter isn't far away!! I love this time of year because the colors at this time of the year are truly spectacular!! It's also that time of year that we'll have to close up the cottage until next spring. 

The other day as I driving my daughter home I had to stop and wait for a train. Who in there right mind builds a city, and puts train tracks running right through the middle of the it. Seeing as we weren't going anywhere fast I got to talking to the person in the car next to mine. I soon discovered that she had been recovering from brain surgery for a brain aneurism that she had suffered from. So she had been suffering from severe migraine like headaches. We got to talking about chronic pain and how people either don't take you seriously about it, or just don't see it as being as something serious.

It can be so frustrating dealing with something that clearly so many people just don't understand. I have come across so many people who tell me that their doctor just doesn't understand how much pain they're in. They also tell me that they are told that it's all in there head and that it isn't real. Early on before I was diagnosed I was one of those people who was misunderstood. It wasn't that the doctors that were seeing me didn't care I just don't think they had enough understanding of what all involves. Really all you have to do is look at the sheer number of people who get told that it's all in their head. Could there be a common link between all those people? Or are all those people crazy?

There are roughly 75 million people that live with some form of chronic pain in the U.S. alone. I don't know what the numbers are here in Canada, or around the world for that matter. We need to draw attention to this and start letting people that we won't go away and that we are just as important as the next. There is a site that I came across that is doing just that. The site is called http://www.invisibleproject.org/ and I would encourage you to go to the site. On the site they say that pain has become the invisible disease and that it goes untreated and underfunded. Aren't these two areas that need to be addressed? We need to do as much as we can to start raising awareness!!

You can read everything for yourself on their site, I'm just trying to say we need to do everything we can to help the cause. Don't think that just because your one person that your say isn't important. Just think of what type of reaction we might get if each one of us were to write a letter to our Federal Health Minister. I'm not saying that this is all it would take but it's a starting point. To often we take the approach that nothing can be done.I'm guilty of that myself. Ask yourself what you've done to raise awareness for your condition. We need to see education taking place within our medical communities. It isn't that there isn't education happening we just need to raise it to a whole new level. Instead of saying that nothing can be done our mentality needs to change into thinking that something can be done. It's about taking baby steps and as we start to see the awareness then change will follow.