Last week’s layoffs across the Department of Health and Human Services left a significant casualty in the vast ecosystem of government-backed science: an entire division focused on researching pain.
The reduction in force enacted last week by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. eliminated all but one full-time position, out of roughly a dozen, within the National Institutes of Health Office of Pain Policy and Planning, a unit devoted to coordinating pain-related research across the federal government.
None of the NIH’s 27 institutes focuses specifically on pain, leaving research into both acute and chronic pain, as well as its physiological causes and associated health outcomes, highly fragmented. By many measures, pain is the country’s most common disabling condition — 17 million people experience “high-impact” chronic pain, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
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