Smoking, Obesity, Mental Illness and Chronic Pain

A study published late last year (but which I just now got around to reading...) establishes a clear link between smoking and chronic back pain.  I know what you're thinking: file that under "stuff we already knew and didn't need an academic study to prove."  But this study is interesting not simply because it establishes a link we all observe daily in workers' compensation claims management; it also focuses on the underlying mechanism that associates the behavior of smoking and the condition we know as chronic back pain.

The study concludes that the risk of sub-acute back pain progressing to chronic back pain is 3X greater among smokers vs. non-smokers.  Further, the subjects were subjected to functional MRI scans and it turns out that the relationship between smoking and chronic back pain is "mediated by corticostriatal circuitry involved in addictive behavior and motivated learning."  I don't know what that means, exactly, but it's clear that smoking wires the brain in such a way that chronic pain becomes a common outcome of acute injury.

Here's the hard question: What can we do about it?  If we know, objectively, that the likelihood of a workplace injury developing into chronic pain is significantly increased due to smoking... what are our options?   Some of you have access to fancy algorithms (or predictive models, I think you call them) that will tell you to put a case manager on a claim like this right away.  And I think that's great.  But what options does the case manager have?

I'm asking because I think this is one of three fundamental issues the workers' compensation medical management world is going to deal with over the next five years.

• How do we deal with chronic pain in light of smoking?
• How do we deal with chronic pain in light of obesity?
• How do we deal with chronic pain in light of mental/behavioral illness?  

Most of you are dealing with claims wherein all three of these crucial questions have come together in a perfect storm of complexity, confusion, and cost.

So...
How do we (legally) avoid hiring high risk people in the first place?
How do we prevent them from getting injured once we do employ them?
And the hardest question of all: How do we fix them once they're injured?

We spend so much time focused on the last question.  The answers are hard to devise and even harder to implement.  I suppose the least we can do is put some focus on the first two questions in an attempt to limit the number of times we have to find answers to the third.

Michael
On Twitter @PRIUM1