By Ed Coghlan.

The chronic pain community is putting September 25 and 26th on their calendars.

Those are the dates of the second meeting of the Pain Management Best Practices Inter-Agency Task Force in Washington D.C.

The Pain Management Best Practices Inter-Agency Task Force was established to propose updates to best practices and issue recommendations that address gaps or inconsistencies for managing chronic and acute pain. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is overseeing this effort with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and U.S. Department of Defense.

U.S. Pain’s National Director of Policy & Advocacy, Cindy Steinberg, is the only patient and advocate appointed to this federal panel. We asked her for some comments prior to the meeting but she said that the Task Force has asked that members not individually speak with the media yet.

If you aren’t going to Washington, you can still watch the meeting on a webcast. (Here’s a link)

By the way, the meeting which will convene in the Hubert H. Humphrey Building, 200 Independence Avenue, S.W., Washington, D.C. – is open to the public but registration is closed.

The public comment period closed on September.

For those advocates and members of the public already registered, they will have an opportunity to provide comments at the meeting September 25th. But they are receiving only 30 minutes (from 9:20 a.m. to 9:50 a.m.). Since comments are limited to three minutes per person, probably only a dozen people will able to comment.

This meeting is being held in September which is Pain Awareness Month.

Earlier this month the Centers for Disease Control published a study that claims chronic pain affects about 50 million US adults — and what it calls “high-impact” chronic pain, (others call it intractable chronic pain) which interferes with work and other activities, affects around 20 million,

By the way, other studies and data have put the chronic pain number at double that number.

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