Harry Perkins, son of Olympic champion swimmer and Painaustralia Director Kieren Perkins OAM, was diagnosed with chronic migraine at the tender age of eleven.
That Friday in June 1990 began like any other Friday – two adults, three teenagers, family pets, all heading out. I was totally unaware that this was the day "Super Mum" would die and life as I knew it would be over.
It happened on 28 August 2008 at 8.28am. Everything after that is a bit of a blur, but the moment the accident happened will be stuck in my memory forever.
6 when I was 17. Unrelated to any incident, I began to experience extreme back pain. I later discovered it was a degenerative disease with no cure, but at the time I thought it could just be 'fixed'.
My problems started in the early 1980s with the introduction of computers in most public service departments.In 1986,
In 1962 at the age of 21, Renée was involved in a serious car accident that kept her in an English hospital - in a 40-bed geriatric ward - for nearly two years.
I had two major cycling accidents in the 1980s which caused a spinal fracture and severe whiplash.I quickly got over the accidents and was fine until the early 1990s when I started to have migraines. This gradually progressed to daily migraines by 1996.
When I was 25, I was living life to the full. Then, literally overnight, I became ill. It was 15 April 1998, a date I will never forget, when I woke up in severe pain. I had to crawl on my elbows and knees to go to the bathroom. I had pain in all my joints – it even hurt to breathe.
As a chronic migraine sufferer I've lived with pain since I was a small child. With the help of sub-occipital electrodes and an implanted pulse generator (IPG implant) I can now manage my daily pain and rely less on heavy medications.
I woke up one morning in 1988 with a sore back.As the pain continued to increase, I consulted my general practitioner who referred me to an orthopedic surgeon. After some tests, I was told that there were no problems and that the pain should go away. It didn't.
Breast cancer is a diagnosis heard all too often these days at 13,000 diagnoses a year in Australia.
I was nine years old when I damaged the ligaments in my left leg in a hurdling accident.After a year of treatment my leg hadn't healed – in fact the pain had worsened and I was diagnosed with chronic regional pain syndrome. 
My first taste of pain and injury was when I was only three years old.We had a car accident and I had my lower lumbar joints damaged as well as whiplash injuries to my neck. No one knew this at the time, though, and by the time I was nine I was having X-rays on my back to find out why I was in so much pain.
My injury happened over two days – August 30-31, 2001 – when I was asked to reorganise the office's new filing system.
Before my accident, about six years ago, I worked at a prestige car dealership in Brisbane. This work was physically demanding as well as being quite social. We all had to get on well as it could be quite a pressured environment and humour often kept us going.
I'd survived the traumas of a major motor car accident, the ignominity of a prostatectomy, and the despair and exasperation of three separate cancers and their harsh therapies, but nothing had prepared me for the greatest challenge of my life, dealing with chronic pain
I was an advisory teacher when I suffered a spinal injury in 2007 that landed me in a Brisbane hospital emergency department.Thanks to a neurosurgeon, I regained the use of my left leg and the crushing pain eased. 
I injured my neck in 1993 while attending a Scout Jamboree in Canada as a carer for a child with cerebral palsy.My pain symptoms didn't really show up until 1997 when I started getting lots of neck and arm pain. 
It was during a long jump attempt at my school's athletics try-outs when I was nine that I first hurt myself.As usual, I ran and jumped but as I hit the sand I felt pain in what I thought was my ankle.
September 23, 2006 was a beautiful, still, sunny autumn day.I was in the UK to visit my elderly mother and other family members and had taken the train to London to visit a friend.
I first incurred a serious back injury at work in 1985. It was not able to be evidence-based for five years (at the time of surgery).
"Fortunately", the pain from my neck injury was so severe that it was taken seriously from the start.
Why We Need The NPS
It's time to make pain a national health priority.
Chronic pain is an enourmous, growing public health issue:
- One in five Australians lives with chronic pain including adolescents and children.
- This prevalence rises to one in three people over the age of 65.The prevalence of chronic pain is projected to increase as Australia's population ages – from around 3.2 million in 2007 to 5 million by 2050.1
The economic impact of chronic pain:
- The total economic cost of chronic pain in 2007 was estimated at $34 Billion, including $11 Billion productivity costs and $7 Billion direct health care costs.1
- Chronic pain is Australia's third most costly health condition after cardiovascular diseases and musculoskeletal conditions (also associated with chronic pain).Arthritis and back problems, both associated with chronic pain are the most common causes for people of working age (between 45 and 64) to drop out of the workforce, accounting for 40% of forced retirements - around 280,000 people in 2012.2
- This has a significant impact on workplace productivity and Australia's economic health, with the lost workforce due to arthritis and back problems alone, estimated to cost the economy over $4 Billion a year in 2012.
Lack of access to pain services:
- Less than 10% of people with chronic non-cancer pain gain access to effective care, despite the fact that current knowledge would allow 80% to be treated effectively, if there was adequate access to pain services.3
- Patients face long waiting times to access multidisciplinary pain services in public hospitals – frequently more than a year – resulting in deterioration in quality of life and reduction in ability to return to work.4
- The Faculty of Pain Medicine of the Australian and New Zealand College of Anaesthetists reports that there are only 275 pain medicine specialists practicing in Australia and they are unable to meet the needs of 20% of the population. Twice as many palliative care physicians are trained every year compared with pain specialists.
Poor management of pain in aged care:
- People in aged care facilities generally are being either over-treated or under-treated for pain, compromising quality of life.5
- People with dementia who are living with pain are being under-treated, compared with cognitively intact people, despite having similar levels of potentially painful disease.5
- In residential aged care, 92% of people are taking at least one analgesic medication daily and 80% of people list pain as a problem.6
Impact of pain on children and families:
- Between 25% and 35% of children experience chronic pain, with the greatest incidence in adolescence, especially for young girls.7
- Children with chronic pain often drop out of school, can become socially withdrawn and isolated, fail to achieve their academic potential and miss job opportunities.8
- There are only five dedicated multidisciplinary paediatric pain services in Australia and only one of these in a regional centre.9
Links between chronic pain and mental health:
- One in five Australian adults with severe or very severe pain also suffer depression or other mood disorders.10
- Physical health problems, many associated with chronic pain have been implicated in 21% of suicides in Australia.11
- Forty years ago depression was widely misunderstood, highly stigmatised and poorly treated. Yet today we know that it is a serious biological illness that if left untreated can lead to suicide. Like depression, chronic pain can become a serious and debilitating disease in its own right. Yet it struggles to get awareness, although it can significantly diminish quality of life of patients and their families and the risk of suicide is twice as high in people who have chronic pain.12
1 MBF Foundation (2007) The high price of pain: the economic impact of persistent pain in Australia – Pain Management Research Institute, University of Sydney.
2 Schofield el al. (2012) Quantifying the Productivity impacts of poor health and health interventions. Health economics, University Sydney Oct 2012
3 National Pain Strategy (2010)
4 Australian Pain Society (2010) Waiting in Pain
5 Gibson SJ. (2007)The IASP Global Year Against Pain in Older Persons: Highlighting the current status and future perspectives in geriatric pain. Expert Reviews in Neurotherapeutics 7: 627-635
6 Department of Health and Ageing (2012)
7 www.anzca.edu.au/communications/Media
8 Australian Pain Society (2012)
9 Bush D, Evans S, Vancaillie T (2011) The $6 Billion Woman and the $600 Million Girl: The Pelvic Pain Report.
10 Australian Bureau of Statistics (2011) 4841.0 Facts at your fingertips: Health: Characteristics of bodily pain in Australia
11 Commonwealth of Australia (2006)National Activities in Suicide Bereavement Project: Canberra, Department of Health and Ageing
12 www.suicidepreventionaust.org -SPA-PositionStatement-_April_2012