It's a pleasure to be spending this time with you. One of the activities that I do each week is I set aside some time to sit down and brainstorm about all the various topics that are related to chronic pain. The reason why I do that is it helps me find interesting and inspiring people to share with you on this show. If you follow this show for probably for a couple of years I've been doing it, you know that I've spoken about popular topics such as pain education, pain psychology, exercise, physical therapy and nutrition. One topic that interests me and quite frankly is the topic that doesn't receive enough attention in the media or receive grant money for research is the topic of health disparities. A health disparity is a difference in the health status of different groups of people.
For example, patients such as racial minorities and women have been identified as not receiving adequate pain care. Another group that faces significant barriers, adequate healthcare are transgender people. Transgender is an umbrella term for a diverse group of people whose gender identity or expression differs from societal expectations of how they should look, act or identify based on the sex they were assigned at birth. There are approximately 1.5 million transgender people living in the United States of America. Although this data is incomplete because many transgender people feel uncomfortable or feel that it's not safe to share their personal information.
From a healthcare perspective, transgender people experience higher rates of suffering and disabling conditions including a wide range of mental health problems and chronic pain conditions including chronic pelvic pain. Unfortunately, when transgender people seek treatment, they often encounter providers who do not understand their unique needs, face challenges with health insurance and are often neglected or perhaps even mistreated within the healthcare system. Here to speak with us about improving transgender healthcare is Dr. lore m. dickey. lore was raised as a female but never truly felt at home with the female identity. Several years after his transition, he returned to school to become a licensed clinical psychologist. He learned early in life that the best way to make a change is to be part of the solution. lore is the author of two books, 22 journal articles and seventeen book chapters.
He's an advocate for the trans community and a prolific and engaging speaker. lore is also providing you with two free resources that you can download on the show. The first is the American Psychological Association Task Force on Guidelines for Psychology Practice with Transgender and Gender Nonconforming People. lore developed these guidelines along with the APA. The second is a complete list of all the books and book chapters which lore has contributed to. lore did receive the 2014 Presidential Citation by the American Psychological Association for his dedication to the LGBT community. He's got great resources. Take a moment now to download them. To download them, all you have to do is text the word, 137DOWNLOAD, to the number 44-222. You can do that right on your smartphone or if you're on a computer, you can open up a new browser and type in the URL www.IntegrativePainScienceInstitute.com/137download. lore is a leader in transgender healthcare. I want to thank him for joining us on this show and all the work that he's doing for the transgender community. Let's begin and let's meet Dr. lore dickey.
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