Medical science offered very little in the way of safe, lasting relief back then. We are not much further along now. As Andrew Rice, a pain researcher at Imperial College London, told Nature in 2016, ‘The drugs we have relieve 50 per cent of pain in somewhere between one in four and one in seven of the patients we treat.14 That’s for the best drugs.’ In other words, some 75 per cent to 85 per cent of people get no benefit at all from even the best pain drugs, and those that do get benefit don’t usually get much. Pain relief, as Irene Tracey puts it, has been ‘a pharmacological graveyard’.
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