Pain Points

One in five people suffer from chronic pain, and in recent decades healthcare systems increasingly turned to opioids for treatment. Now, twin crises of opioid misuse and undertreated chronic pain present a political, economic, and ethical conundrum globally. While public conversation has centered a narrative of greedy pharmaceutical companies and doctors, Jane Pryma contends that this is only part of a much larger story. In Pain Points Pryma widens the lens to tell the global and comparative story of a transnational network of well-meaning doctors, politicians, and pain patients who framed pain relief as a right, and selected opioids as the best tool to realize it. She traces the trajectories of chronic pain management as a medical and political project in the United States and France, analyzing how and why each country realized patient rights to pain relief through different practices: slow, individualized, interdisciplinary care in France versus the rapid, widespread prescription of opioids in the United States. Through this comparison of pain management, nested in a transnational analysis of global health politics, Pain Points explains how the institutionalization of a new right shapes medical expertise in different national settings, revealing the stakes for providers, researchers, and patients when a rights claim becomes associated with a global health crisis.