11/19/2025
Meet CSI:OPIOIDs Team Member, Kate Nicholson!
Hello Kate, tell us about yourself!
I’m Kate Nicholson, Executive Director and founder of the National Pain Advocacy Center (NPAC). I’m also a civil rights attorney with a long-term focus on helping assure that people with disabilities are treated justly and fairly, as is required by law. I was a primary drafter of the current regulations under the Americans with Disabilities Act.
What is your professional background or personal connection to this work. Why are you interested in this study?
As I mentioned, I had an eighteen-year career as a civil rights and disability rights attorney in the US Department of Justice. But I also became a person with long-term and severe pain during that period. A surgical injury to the nerve plexus leading into my spinal cord left me substantially limited in my ability to sit, stand or walk for two decades.
In 2015, after undergoing the first of two surgeries that restored my mobility, I moved to Colorado to work on physical rehabilitation. I was just coming off of the opioid medication I’d taken long term, when my new doctor in Colorado announced that she was going to stop prescribing opioids to all patients effective immediately. A local clinician had been investigated by the DEA; other clinicians were changing their prescribing to protect their practices. Still, after twenty years I was finally getting my health back ,and I knew sudden opioid termination could be dangerous so it was frightening.
I learned that many people with pain were facing challenges getting care, particularly after a 2016 guideline released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. I decided to speak up and begin advocating for people with pain. Along the way, I met the CSI:OPIOIDs principal investigator, Stefan, and we advocated together. I speak to policymakers all the time. I know that research data is absolutely crucial to helping them understand what is happening in the public health space.
What difference do you hope this work will make to others?
I truly believe that we need to take pain and people with pain seriously. To do that we have to recognize that pain affects us all differently, and that sometimes the way we treat pain can make it a lot worse. My hope is that this collaboration and others will bring understanding to a terrible consequence of society’s pendulum swing on opioid prescribing – forcibly taking people off opioids and creating barriers to their healthcare –and help shift the tide so we can make pain care better.
What has been the most interesting/surprising/meaningful thing about doing this work, so far?
It’s meaningful to work alongside a dedicated team of experts and advisors who are all genuinely focused on gathering data on a problem we are too often told is only anecdotal and one that has not been adequately researched.
What do you think people in our society might need to learn at this time about pain and its care?
Pain, especially chronic pain, is so often misunderstood. It is the largest cause of disability, and our most costly chronic health condition in the U.S. Still, so many people think those living with pain can just “buck up” and press through. Scientific consensus now considers chronic pain as a disease like any other, but it isn’t often managed that way.
