The final week of Pain Awareness Month, and the national theme is One Movement.
It is worth being precise about what that means, because “movement” can be a word that means very little.
Here is the concrete version. Pain research at UF depends on a chain of people, and most of that chain is invisible from outside. There are the investigators who design studies. The trainees who will run the field in twenty years and are currently learning how. The coordinators who recruit, consent, schedule, and follow up. The clinicians who notice something in practice worth asking a research question about.
And then there are the participants — without whom every other link is theoretical.
That last group is the one most often thanked and least often explained. So, plainly: the reason we know that chronic pain affects a quarter of American adults, that pain memory is distorted by variability, that knee X-rays predict pain poorly, and that disparities in pain treatment run through structural conditions rather than biology, is that tens of thousands of people agreed to be studied. Most of them received no personal benefit. They filled in questionnaires, sat through sensory testing, lay still in scanners, and came back for follow-up visits.
This week covers the parts of that chain you can actually join: our training programs, our journal club, our registry, and the volunteer routes into the center.
One movement, in the only sense that matters — a lot of people doing specific things.
What we study:
- Pain and Aging
- Chronic Pain Risk Factors
- Pain and the Brain
- Musculoskeletal Pain
- Pain and Exercise
- Non-Medical Treatment of Pain
Prefer to talk to a person? Call 352-273-5967 or email PRICE-CTSI@ufl.edu.
UF Study ID IRB201400126
References
- U.S. Pain Foundation. Pain Awareness Month 2026: #OneVoiceForPain. https://uspainfoundation.org/painawarenessmonth/
- PRICE Research Registry recruitment materials, UF Study ID IRB201400126. IRB-approved; supplied by site owner. https://is.gd/PRICE