Kevin F. Boehnke

I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anesthesiology and the Chronic Pain and Fatigue Research Center at the University of Michigan medical school, where I study chronic pain, cannabis, and psychedelics. I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia 15 years ago, and draw from both my lived experience as a patient and research background in this article. I have seen and experienced firsthand the ways that clinicians and patients talk about chronic pain medications, and find them to generally be disempowering to the patient, clinician, and drugs themselves. My goal in this article is to help provide a new and more useful lens to think about medications, especially given the poor treatment outcomes for people with chronic pain, the frustration providers express about treating these “challenging patients”, and the ongoing opioid overdose crisis.