many orthopedic and sports medicine specialists, who once thought of their profession as serving the more athletic community, are finding the majority of their patients are baby boomers with complaints of aches and pains associated with overuse of muscles.

Never before has the medical community experienced such an overwhelming number of patients with general body pain.

Understanding the implication of fitness on the aging population, including baby boomers, healthcare professionals are beginning to not only serve the baby boomer generation¡¯s physical ailments but also developing a program to serve the emotional implications of aging for this same generation. This combination approach to care is becoming more widely practiced in response to what is known as a new medical term, ¡°boomeritis¡±. 

Boomeritis refers to both a physical and mental level of thinking with regard to fitness, physical activity and aging, prevalent among the aging population born between 1946 and 1964. 

 The complaints are often associated with general aging, deterioration of bones, joints and ligaments with the added influence of minor sports and fitness related injuries. For most healthcare professionals within the orthopedic and sports medicine specialty, the treatment recommendation generally comes in the form of continued movement, although less strenuous.

This concept is, in most cases, in the conceptual line of thinking for the baby boomer patient as this generation has the ¡°get up and go¡± mentality. However, this recommendation, by healthcare professionals to simply keep moving, is not generally what the baby boomer really wants to hear. For the baby boomer generation, the desire to find a quick fix to boomeritis is ideal. 

New Treatment Options

There are many new pain treatments under development, Portenoy says. These include disease-specific treatments, such as procedures that treat compression fractures of the spine to relieve back pain. New drugs called sodium-channel blockers specific for pain cells are under development, as are chemicals isolated from plants, such as hot peppers, that could reduce inflammatory pain that occurs when people have diseases like arthritis.

For the kinds of severe pain often seen in cancer patients, there are new, more specific narcotic or morphine-like pain medications under development, says Patrick W. Mantyh, PhD, a research scientist at the Minneapolis Veterans Administration Medical Center and a neuroscientist at the University of Minnesota.

"These new, synthetic opioids may have fewer side effects than the kinds of drugs we now use to fight cancer pain and other severe pain," says Mantyh. "There are numerous other potential targets, as signaling in the pain system has many distinguishing molecular features that might make good drug targets."

But many pain specialists stress that they already have many good treatment options for pain. A big part of the chronic pain problem in the U.S. comes from reluctance on the part of patients to discuss pain.

"That's a big reason for the new pain-treatment mandates," says Mantyh. "It isn't that we can't effectively treat pain in most patients. It's that many patients are way too willing to suffer quietly, not knowing that help is available -- that there is no need to suffer sometimes."

It appears that the writing is on the wall, or at least the pain chart is on the wall, when it comes to dealing with chronic pain in America, no matter what your age.

"The charts are bringing pain out of the closet," says Campbel. "When patients and doctors can discuss the existence of pain, then they can work together to make a person's quality of life much, much better."