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In Their Own Words
Insurers Should Incentivize Non-Drug Treatments for Chronic Pain
An LDI Fellow and Chronic Pain Researcher Call on Health Plans To Lower Barriers to Physical Therapy, Acupuncture, and Interdisciplinary Pain Care
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This op-ed originally appeared in KevinMD.com on March 24, 2026.
The opioid crisis rages on, and there is plenty of blame to go around: pharmaceutical companies, drug distributors, reckless prescribers, the FDA. One entity that has been overlooked is health insurance, whose incentives pushed chronic pain patients to take opioids in the first place.
Check out your insurance plan and the copays you pay for different services. In one of ours, a generic medication costs $10 a month, at most. Physical therapy, which can be hugely beneficial for pain, costs patients $50 per session, assuming you have hit your deductible. Weekly visits would amount to $200 per month, or 20 times the cost of the drug.
It is no wonder chronic pain patients came to rely on opioids.
Making it worse is the fact that non-drug treatments and integrative approaches like acupuncture require more effort: They need time, transportation, and childcare, and may not be covered by insurance at all. But these treatments carry lower risks and more benefits than opioids, which remain a predominant treatment for chronic pain despite a decade of deprescribing. Moreover, the effects of non-drug treatments tend to last. For example, acupuncture has been shown to ease sciatica pain for a year after treatment.
Read the full op-ed here.
Authors
Molly Candon, PhD
Assistant Professor, Psychiatry, Perelman School of Medicine; Assistant Professor, Health Care Management, Wharton School
Daniel Clauw, MD
Scientific Director, Chronic Pain and Fatigue Research Center; Professor, Anesthesiology, Medicine (Rheumatology), and Psychiatry, University of Michigan
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