The effect of pain on survival

For patients suffering various diseases, increased pain hastens death by interfering with life-enhancing activities; if it hurts to eat, patients won't eat; if it hurts to move, they won't move. But survival simply cannot be enhanced by reducing pain because, even as some pain treatments have a beneficial effect on disease (spinal cord stimulation on coronary artery disease, for example), other pain treatments can have an adverse effect on survival. Thus, we must continue to investigate pain and its treatment even as we use the best possible techniques available to treat pain as aggressively as we would any other disease.