ARTICLE SUMMARY:
Pain is individual, yet the field lacks biomarkers by which clinicians can tailor therapies to their patients. To enable more effective treatments, Celéri Health brings real-world data and an AI-enabled platform to clinicians and therapy developers to help them address the extreme heterogeneity of pain patients.
Among conditions that clinicians treat, pain is unique. Michael Fishman, MD, a pain specialist practicing in the Philadelphia area and a key opinion leader in the field of neuromodulation and interventional pain medicine, notes, “Pain is the only specialty named after a symptom. It encompasses almost everything that we do in medicine. It is the number one reason for anyone to seek care from a physician, period, end of story.” Indeed, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, chronic pain affects about 21% of people in the US.
Fishman continues, “Pain occurs acutely, chronically, and episodically, and it can affect any part of your body.” It’s also experienced and reported differently by every patient, because how pain they feel pain is influenced by the elements that make up their biological or biomechanical state, psychological profile, and their social determinants of health. There is no straightforward correlation between visible signs of anatomical damage and a patient’s sense of their pain. Finally, says Fishman, “the nuances of how people might have one pain generator, or two, or three, and whether they are overlapping or separate makes it even more complex.”
These confounding factors result, too often, in inadequate pain relief, or a lengthy patient journey to the pain therapy that finally works for them. Today, says Fishman, “It is a lot easier to tell you what doesn’t work in pain care than what does, and that is very expensive.”
