Published 24 July 2009, doi:10.1136/bmj.b2786
Cite this as: BMJ 2009;339:b2786

Practice

A Patient’s Journey

Persistent pain

Mary Ray, patient, Joan Hester, consultant in pain medicine1

1 King’s College Hospital, London SE5 9RS

Correspondence to: J Hester Joan.hester@kch.nhs.uk

This patient describes the strategies she has developed for coping with her persistent pain from longstanding pancreatitis

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

In his annual report, published in March this year, Professor Sir Liam Donaldson, the UK government’s principal medical adviser, noted that almost eight million Britons have persistent chronic pain, which can prevent them working and ruin the quality of their lives. And yet, he said, because the UK has only one pain management specialist for every 250 000 citizens, only one in seven people with persistent pain ever sees a specialist.

I’ve had chronic pancreatitis for over 12 years. I wasn’t your typical pancreatitis patient: I wasn’t male or in my 70s, and I hadn’t misused alcohol. I’m one of a third of people for whom the cause is unknown. Quite simply, it’s a pig: persistent pain, tiredness, and frequent diarrhoea. And it disrupts your life. I kept working for over two years, but I was going downhill rapidly and I reluctantly had to take early retirement.

Part of coping . . . [Full text of this article]

Patient barriers
Health service barriers*

Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Complore Complore   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us   Add to Digg Digg   Add to Reddit Reddit   Add to StumbleUpon StumbleUpon   Add to Technorati Technorati    What's this?

Rapid Responses:

Read all Rapid Responses

Vitamin D
milind m deshpande, et al.
bmj.com, 28 Jul 2009 [Full text]
Depression in persistent pain
M N siddiqi, et al.
bmj.com, 30 Jul 2009 [Full text]
Access jobs at BMJ Careers
Whats new online at Student BMJ