SWHR provided the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) with requested comments on Management of Acute and Chronic Pain.
Pain impacts women differently than men and is an enormous public health issue with profound individual and societal consequences.
SWHR called on the CDC to incorporate the HHS Pain Management Best Practices Inter-agency Task Force’s recommendations into its own updated pain management guidance and education materials. Specifically, SWHR urged the CDC to:
- Expand on basic, translational, and clinical research examining sex differences in chronic and acute pain.
- Leverage existing interagency resources, information, and best practices to inform the CDC research agenda and approach.
- Increase inclusion of complex patient populations at high risk for pain in ongoing research, including pregnant and lactating women and women in menopausal transition and post-menopause.
- Prioritize multidisciplinary treatment research as well as studies involving non-opioid options for managing pain symptoms.
- Conduct and publish sex- and gender-based analyses in order to best understand potential differences in response to treatment.
- Coordinate with CMS to address reimbursement and access issues for non-opioid treatment options for both chronic and acute pain.
- Capture the patient voice when updating CDC pain management guidance to reflect the diversity of patient experiences and perspectives with pain.
- Develop and disseminate public, patient, and provider education materials about pain conditions that are more prevalent in women and their full range of treatment options, with a particular focus on addressing complex and poorly understood pain conditions, such as endometriosis and fibromyalgia, and eliminating stigma related to these conditions.
Read SWHR’s Comments
