Living with chronic pain is something most people are doing quietly and calling something else. Nagging. Stiff. Just how it is. Desmond Williams did that for twelve years. He knew his condition was hereditary. His mother had already been diagnosed. He kept going to work at the warehouse anyway.

The morning he couldn't get down the stairs was the moment. Not the decade of pain before it. Not the lifting of two hundred pound boxes without help. The stairs. That is how long most people wait and that specific gap is what nobody in pain research was measuring until PEPR started asking who was actually missing from the conversation. The people at the table making decisions about pain care in Canada have tended to be white, highly educated, and often detached from the systems being designed. Desmond Williams sits at that table now as a co-director, chairs his own research committee of people with lived experience, and his thirty years of pain is the credential.

Stats Canada says functional health in Canadian adults is declining. What the stat does not contain is what it actually feels like to reach the stairs and stop.

Topics: living with chronic pain Canada, PEPR pain research, chronic pain care access, Desmond Williams, Stats Canada health decline

GUEST: Kathleen Rice and Desmond Williams | http://pepr-partnership.org

Originally aired on 2026-04-10