Los Angeles Chronic Pain

PWLE Voices is a free, all-volunteer community newsletter for people with lived experience (PWLE) of chronic pain, and for the people who sit beside them.

People living with pain are being invited into research and policy as never before. We sit on advisory boards. We review the grant applications that decide what gets studied.

The invitations arrive one at a time.

A story told alone rarely changes how a study gets designed. This newsletter exists to connect those stories. Readers come to know one another’s work. They learn how the systems that shape pain research actually run, and what standards those systems have already written down for themselves.

The team does not stop at people with pain. Researchers are already at the table. We are widening it to practitioners, the people who deliver care, and to payers, the insurers and health plans that decide what gets covered.

Each issue opens on a person before a role. Every profile is built on that person’s own words. Nothing publishes until they have read it and approved it, and every contributor is invited to edit the whole issue, not just their own piece.

The newsletter carries no advertising and charges nothing. Paid relationships are disclosed at the top of a piece, in the first person. Every issue says plainly how we use AI.

We think of engagement as a ladder. It runs from the audience, to the microphone, to a seat at the table, to a vote, to being the one who calls the meeting.

A seat at the table is not the same as a vote.

Our job is to help each other climb. Every published issue is below, newest first. Start anywhere.