Great to see more people looking at this topic! I should flag that the Happier Lives Institute produced a report on pain last November which goes into quite a bit of depth, although we don’t cover demographics, so that was interesting to learn about (disclaimer: I’m HLI’s Director and contributed to the report). We didn’t label this a report on ‘chronic pain’ but we looked at three causes of pain, all of which lead to long-term pain. These were:
(1) Terminal conditions requiring access to opioids, e.g. cancer
(2) Headache disorders
(3) Low back pain
We investigated each of these separately as they seemed quite distinct regarding solutions and obstacles.
For (1) and (2), there did seem to be good interventions you could use to treat pain, but we weren’t sure what the most promising things for an EA-minded person would be, not how this compared to the other global priorities. For (3), we weren’t really sure what could be done—low back pain doesn’t seem well-understood—apart from suggesting basic research; however, we again, we didn’t get as far as figuring out what basic research would be best.
We somehow missed your report on pain initially. We have read it now and added a link to it in the post. I really liked it. Completely our mistake for overlooking it.
Unfortunately, we can’t really help much with the problem you describe with (3). We agree that it’s a big problem and we also found that it’s not well understood :(
Great to see more people looking at this topic! I should flag that the Happier Lives Institute produced a report on pain last November which goes into quite a bit of depth, although we don’t cover demographics, so that was interesting to learn about (disclaimer: I’m HLI’s Director and contributed to the report). We didn’t label this a report on ‘chronic pain’ but we looked at three causes of pain, all of which lead to long-term pain. These were:
(1) Terminal conditions requiring access to opioids, e.g. cancer
(2) Headache disorders
(3) Low back pain
We investigated each of these separately as they seemed quite distinct regarding solutions and obstacles.
For (1) and (2), there did seem to be good interventions you could use to treat pain, but we weren’t sure what the most promising things for an EA-minded person would be, not how this compared to the other global priorities. For (3), we weren’t really sure what could be done—low back pain doesn’t seem well-understood—apart from suggesting basic research; however, we again, we didn’t get as far as figuring out what basic research would be best.
We somehow missed your report on pain initially. We have read it now and added a link to it in the post. I really liked it. Completely our mistake for overlooking it.
Unfortunately, we can’t really help much with the problem you describe with (3). We agree that it’s a big problem and we also found that it’s not well understood :(