Pain isn’t simply a medical issue—it's psychological and social, too.

According to a recent article in the British Journal of Medicine, the U.S. currently faces twin pain-and-opioid crises (Mackey & Kao, 2019). Chronic pain (CP), pain lasting three or more months or beyond expected healing time, is an epidemic currently affecting over 100 million American adults—more than diabetes, heart disease, and cancer combined—at an estimated cost of $635 billion (IOM, 2011). 

To better understand pain, let’s first define it: the International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP) defines pain as an “unpleasant sensory and emotional experience.” Said another way, pain is both physical and emotional 100 percent of the time. It’s never just one or the other. This is confirmed by neuroscience research indicating that pain is processed by multiple parts of the brain, including the limbic system—your brain’s emotion center (Martucci & Mackey, 2018).

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pj-why mapped to oakland?