Pain Management & Complementary Medicine

By the time she was 24, Rachel Hale was on her fourth diagnosis and had been on headache medication for years. Then she met with Ian Carroll, MD, a headache and orofacial pain specialist at Stanford.

The findings of a new Stanford-led study suggest that illicit drugs are beginning to replace prescription opioids as the source of the national drug epidemic.

With the help of an advocacy program and integrated complex care team at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford, Hari Suresh navigated an obstacle-strewn path to scholastic success.

The Stanford pain psychologist will evaluate the effectiveness of behavioral training to help people with chronic pain reduce their use of opioids.

Stanford researchers said they have identified the receptors to which opioids bind to produce tolerance to the drugs and increased sensitivity to pain. They also found that a commercially available drug limited those side effects in mice.