Chronic Pain: The UK's Silent Health Epidemic
- Adam Filan
- 1 day ago
- 4 min read
Disability due to chronic pain is a massive issue in the UK, with millions of people across the country unable to work, see their friends, or perform everyday tasks because of their condition. As an individual with experience in researching chronic pain and educating others about it, I am passionate about understanding the holistic impact pain has on individuals and how this can be managed.
While working at an NHS chronic pain management service, I had many discussions with people living with chronic pain. Service users often expressed how their pain felt invisible to others, and that the public, as well as healthcare professionals, have a very poor understanding of chronic pain. This increases the stigma around pain conditions, causing people with pain to feel isolated, misunderstood, and ignored, negatively impacting their quality of life, both through social isolation, as well as a lack of appropriate support from others. Because of this, I will discuss what chronic pain is and who it most affects, aiming to give you a better understanding of chronic pain in the UK.
What Is Chronic Pain?
According to the International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP), pain can be defined as an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience, associated with, or resembling that associated with, actual or potential bodily harm.
For pain to be considered chronic, it must persist for at least three months or more. Chronic pain is also categorised into primary and secondary pain. Primary chronic pain often has no clear underlying cause. Pain is the main clinical concern, and examples of this include conditions such as fibromyalgia or chronic low-back pain. Alternatively, secondary chronic pain initially starts as a symptom of an underlying disease, such as cancer, but can persist once the disease that causes pain has been treated. It is important to note that primary and secondary chronic pain can exist simultaneously, and that the causes behind chronic pain can be very complicated, making them very difficult to treat.
Types of Chronic Pain
Nociceptive pain is pain that arises from actual damage to non-neurological tissue. This mainly includes conditions like osteoarthritis, where pain is experienced in joints where the cartilage is worn away, no longer cushioning your bones, causing pain and stiffness. Although some joints, such as your knee, can be replaced to reduce pain, other joints, such as those in your back or hands, cannot be replaced, resulting in long-term pain.
The second type of chronic pain is neuropathic pain, where pain arises from nerve damage or dysfunction. This can include direct physical trauma to nerves, the result of infections such as shingles and HIV, or also as a consequence of other health conditions like diabetes and cancer. Pain can exist in the location of nerve damage, but it can also extend to other parts of the body that the nerve communicates with. Neuropathic pain is also often associated with other non-painful symptoms, like pins and needles, numbness, and muscle weakness.
Lastly, nociplastic pain manifests when the brain and spinal cord are reorganised to be overly vigilant towards threats, causing them to generate painful sensations in the absence of actual bodily harm, seen in conditions like fibromyalgia. This excessive threat perception has multiple causes, including the sensitivity of nerves that perceive pain from the environment, changes in the nerves in the spinal cord that communicate pain, and alterations in brain areas that evaluate pain.
Unlike the other two categories, nociplastic pain can change location, and is often widespread across the body, with the location of the pain unable to be fully explained by neural or non-neural damage. This type of pain is poorly understood by scientists, so clinicians tend to focus on pain management, as opposed to curing pain, using psychosocial therapies, like cognitive behavioural therapy, to improve quality of life.
Who Lives With Chronic Pain?
Due to chronic pain’s complex and varied aetiology, it is very difficult to treat. A meta-analysis estimates that in the UK, chronic pain affects around approximately 28 million people nationwide. An estimated 8 million people live with moderately to severely limiting forms of chronic pain, indicating that disability due to pain is a prominent health burden in the UK. Chronic pain tends to more frequently affect older populations, with 62% of the 75-year-old-and-over age group living with pain. When factoring in the UK’s ageing population, the prevalence of pain may further increase, becoming an even greater issue than it currently is, showing the need to conduct research to combat this.
As well as older people, women typically report chronic pain more frequently than men. A research study of 19 countries, including the UK, with nearly 30,000 participants found significant gender inequalities in chronic pain, with women experiencing more pain than men consistently across most countries. This study suggests that women may be more susceptible to developing chronic pain than men, and although it is not fully understood why this is, it’s important to recognise this increased risk, particularly by clinical staff when making decisions for patient care.
Socioeconomic factors are also shown to impact the distribution of populations experiencing pain, with those living in deprived areas being more vulnerable to chronic pain. In the UK, there is a higher prevalence of moderately and severely limiting chronic pain in the north compared to the south, mirroring the distribution of other health inequalities, such as obesity, diabetes, and cancer. This can be associated with the north-south divide in the UK, where government policies have led to higher levels of deprivation in the north, resulting in less funding for public services. The lack of access to chronic pain services, such as occupational therapy and return-to-work programmes, for those living in deprived areas of the UK may further amplify this pain inequality.
What is the Future of Chronic Pain?
Chronic pain is clearly a very significant issue for the UK, affecting millions of people, and having a significantly detrimental impact on their quality of life. Despite this seeming pessimistic, it’s important to remember that scientists are constantly researching and developing new treatment options for a wide variety of chronic pain conditions, with the aim of eventually curing chronic pain.
As of October 2025, the UK’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) has started a 6-year funded programme of £11 million focusing on new engineering technologies for chronic pain. These will hopefully include an adaptive brain implant, which responds to pain processing in the brain, as well as special drug delivery systems to help prevent addiction to painkilling drugs.
Even though we are still a long way from curing chronic pain, funded research is the way forward in helping people who live with it. Technologies such as neuroimaging, neurotechnology, and pharmaceutical therapeutics will continue to evolve, improving our understanding of chronic pain and, hopefully, enabling us to better support sufferers and reducie the number of people disabled by chronic pain in the future.
