I thought this was interesting in mostly a preclinical sense, but it was unexpected to find that up to 50% of women experience persistent pain after breast surgery for breast cancer.

There are many patients in my practice who complain of persistent chest pain after breast surgery, and we seem to get by with analgesics, but very little explains why pain persists.

So not only is there documented evidence that many women suffer from this problem, but there are people doing research on it.

This is published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, January 2010.

Reuters and others carried the layperson writeup.

Of course using Pristiq for pain is way off label. The drug is probably mostly a patent extender and not a real improvement over Effexor according to clinical trials. For more information including a lively discussion list see Carlat's Psychiatry blog. There are some anecdotes of use in pain syndromes there but InteractMD.com readers know how I feel about anecdotal evidence. http://carlatpsychiatry.blogspot.com/2008/03/top-5-reasons-to-forget-abo...

Shock wave treatments show efficacy for chronic foot pain