Chronic pain among homeless persons: characteristics, treatment, and barriers to management
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Little information is available on the problem of chronic pain among homeless individuals. This study aimed to describe the characteristics of and treatments for chronic pain, barriers to pain management, concurrent medical conditions, and substance use among a representative sample of homeless single adult shelter users who experience chronic pain in Toronto, Canada. METHODS: Participants were randomly selected at shelters for single homeless adults between September 2007 and February 2008 and screened for chronic pain, defined as having pain in the body for ≥ 3 months or receiving treatment for pain that started ≥ 3 months ago. Cross-sectional surveys obtained information on demographic characteristics, characteristics of and treatments for chronic pain, barriers to pain management, concurrent medical conditions, and substance use. Whenever possible, participants' physicians were also interviewed. RESULTS: Among 152 homeless participants who experienced chronic pain, 11 (8%) were classified as Chronic Pain Grade I (low disability-low intensity), 47 (32%) as Grade II (low disability-high intensity), 34 (23%) as Grade III (high disability-moderately limiting), and 54 (37%) as Grade IV (high disability-severely limiting). The most common self-reported barriers to pain management were stress of shelter life, inability to afford prescription medications, and poor sleeping conditions. Participants reported using over-the-counter medications (48%), street drugs (46%), prescribed medications (43%), and alcohol (29%) to treat their pain. Of the 61 interviewed physicians, only 51% reported treating the patient's pain. The most common physician-reported difficulties with pain management were reluctance to prescribe narcotics due to the patient's history of substance abuse, psychiatric comorbidities, frequently missed appointments, and difficulty getting the patient to take medications correctly. CONCLUSIONS: Clinicians who provide healthcare for homeless people should screen for chronic pain and discuss barriers to effective pain management with their patients.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it