Cochrane Complementary Medicine is looking for feedback on what people think are the most important questions to answer in mind-body therapies for people with chronic non-cancer pain.
Access our survey here.
What is Cochrane?
Cochrane is an global independent network of researchers who look for the best evidence on health treatments. The evidence is then summarized in a Cochrane review which is made available to doctors, patients, policy makers, and the public. You can find out more about Cochrane here.
Why do you need to know my opinion?
We want Cochrane research to focus on questions that are important to everyone who has an interest in treating chronic non-cancer pain, including patients and the public, as well as doctors, other researchers, and policy makers. We need to know what questions about mind body medicine and chronic pain still need to be answered so that we prioritize research that is most important to people.
What will you do with my answers?
The answers you give will be collected and we will develop questions to answer out of the data. We will then look at these and see if any of them have already been answered by an up-to-date and good-quality review. If there are questions that haven’t been answered yet, we will bring them to an expert panel to select the questions that are most important to answer. If a Cochrane review on an important question already exists, we will check to see whether it needs to be updated. If a Cochrane review does not exist we will work to carry a review out. When we have information from the reviews we will make the answers to questions available to as wide an audience as possible.
What do you mean by chronic non-cancer pain?
Chronic pain usually means pain that lasts more than three months. It can be the result of disease or illness, or there can be no known reason for the pain. This project focuses on chronic pain that is not due to the person having cancer.
The chronic pain conditions we list in the survey include:
- Chronic low back pain
- Chronic neck pain
- Chronic headaches
- Fibromyalgia
- Osteoarthritis
- Peripheral neuropathy
- Rheumatoid arthritis
You can skip any of the pain conditions that aren't relevant to you, and the survey has an option for you to add another chronic pain condition if you like.
Your privacy
We are not collecting any information that might identify you personally, and all of the responses will be kept anonymous. We may use the data from your answers in reports, but we will never disclose your identity. Our survey has been approved by Cochrane and by the Institutional Review Board (IRB) at the University of Maryland.