When my patients ask me, Doc, if I am so bad at this age, what will happen to me when I am older, I always tell them this: before you get old, we will find better ways to manage your pain. This is more of a wish than a promise. We all know that there are a lot of research being done for finding new ways to manage the chronic pain. One of the new areas of medicine that I believe will change the shape of medicine in future is GENE THERAPY. In recent years, researchers have been successful to find a method of Gene Therapy by injecting an agent kalled AAV8 into the spine to control the transmit of pain from spinal cord to brain. This method is still under investigation but provides a lot of promise for serious chronic pain sufferers in near future. If it is approved as a safe and effective method of treatment in human, it can replace many pain medications. More and more studies like this are coming out and make the wish of finding a new and better way to manage chronic pain more like a promise.
