Researchers believe that they have made a huge step forward in the fight against chronic pain.
A team from the University of Copenhagen recently developed a new treatment for helping to alleviate pain, and preliminary studies have shown that it is incredibly effective. So far, this treatment has only been studied in mice, so there is a long way to go before the compound can be prescribed to humans, but this is a big step forward, especially in light of the issues that have arisen with the use of other painkillers, namely opioids.
This new method is a targeted system and does not focus on the neuronal system as a whole like traditional painkillers do. Instead, it focuses on the area where pain is located. It only impacts the nerves that are being targeted by disease. It looks like this treatment will be ideal for individuals that experience pain because of surgery, diabetes, or another major condition or disease. The spokesperson for the research team indicated that this breakthrough has been more than ten years in the making. Clinical trials are the next step.
They published their findings in the journal, EMBO Molecular Medicine.
Chronic pain affects about 10 percent of the adult population in the United States. When it comes to seniors, that number is much higher. Some estimates put this number as high as 88 percent of the elderly dealing with this issue. Either way, it is a major problem in the U.S. and the rest of the world. This is one of the reasons why the opioid epidemic has had such a major toll. There are a lot of people dealing with pain and there are not a lot of good solutions out there for helping people to cope with it. Hopefully, the research that this team and others are doing will have big dividends down the road.
High quality in-home care is not designed to meet medical needs. That is the arena of home health care, nursing homes, and hospitals. However, in-home care does give seniors a very important feature that other types of care often struggle to meet: individualized attention. While assisted living facilities and nursing homes can do this, it’s almost always on a limited basis just because of the number of people that a caregiver works with.
That’s why we specialize in individualized in-home care. We train each one of our caregivers to be able to look at someone’s specific situation, and then help the family to come up with a care plan that is going to be best for them. Each family and each person in a family are unique. What works for one family isn’t going to always work for another. We know that, and we take great strides to ensure that this concept is a part of every single care plan that we help to create.
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