SIMON: You’ve written that serious chronic pain is a bigger problem than cancer, and for that matter, cancer, heart disease and diabetes combined.
FOREMAN: And you can even throw in AIDS. There are more people suffering from chronic pain than all those four other things put together. That’s 100 million American – American adults, by the way, not kids, not people military returning from the wars, or even people in nursing homes – so that may actually be an underestimate. That figure comes from a report in 2011 from the Institute of Medicine. They’re not all in excruciating, debilitating pain, but an estimated 10 to 30 percent are. So that’s a lot of people.
SIMON: Well, help remind people what that means for someone’s life.
FOREMAN: Oh, my God. Some people can’t get out of bed, or they can’t walk. Many people get very depressed, and it really is a life-wrecking thing. And in some cases, it’s a life-ending thing because what a lot of people don’t realize is that the suicide risk among people in chronic pain is twice that for people not in pain.