Thank you very much.
My story is really quite typical. I was injured 25 years ago, and I dealt with the health care system in my province of Ontario, which was not prepared to support me or my health care professionals with the necessary acute care management, which might have prevented the situation from going chronic—but definitely not in the treatment of the chronic pain.
Twenty-five years later we have made some inroads, but not very many. We know that the gold standard, if you will, for the management of chronic pain is multi-disciplinary, which means that you would possibly have medications with the involvement of your physician and/or have a physiotherapist, an occupational therapist, or someone who can help you learn to live with your pain—perhaps a psychologist using cognitive behavioural therapy.
Along with that intervention from the medical system, we have to involve the individuals who have the pain problem and get them very active in their pain care. We can no longer be passive.
Part of the problem is that most Canadians don't understand the difference between acute pain and chronic pain. Acute pain is the temporary pain that lets us know there's a problem and that we might have to seek medical assistance. Chronic pain serves absolutely no purpose to the body at all. This is what creates the suffering.
We need to involve everyone in this model. It is about the lifestyle changes I was able to make, including exercise, diet, and rethinking what my life was like with pain and how I was going to keep it productive. I found the Canadian Pain Coalition, which is an amazing organization that from the very beginning has fought to bring in the people with the problem, to bring a voice to the pain. And if you look at me now, you wouldn't know I'm sitting here in pain. If I had to give my pain level on a scale between zero and ten, or the worst pain I've ever had, I would tell you that I'm at a seven right now because of the travelling I've done.
What the coalition has done with the Canadian Pain Society is to create a national pain strategy for Canada. We will have that finalized at the beginning of January. We are going to launch that national pain strategy at a Canadian pain summit here at the Chateau Laurier down the street on April 24, 2012.
The idea behind the national strategy is that it's a policy document meant to inform all provinces about the changes necessary within the health care system to support our health care providers and people with pain. We're looking for all Canadians to endorse this as of the beginning of January.