Tuesday August 26th 2025
Councillor Aileen Orr
Written by Local Democracy Reporter, Paul Kelly
A Scottish Borders councillor has revealed how she has turned to chocolate to help cope with chronic pain.
Independent East Berwickshire representative Aileen Orr is about to go into Borders General Hospital for a hip replacement following on from a knee replacement operation last October.
She said: “What I have found with my weight is that it has increased and increased and actually it’s due to pain.
“Lots of people turn to food to overcome pain or even alcohol because the arthritic pain that I am going through at the moment, during which on some days I am not able to be mobile, I am not burning off anything I am eating.
“The problem is I have to look at a substitute to get through the day and it tends to be chocolate, cake and all the bad things because it does give you a little bit of a lift.
“I just wonder if there could be more emphasis on pain and the reduction of pain.
“At my local doctors at The Knoll there used to be an incredible service where you could just walk in and have physiotherapy, you could have dietary help but this has changed a bit post-Covid.
“Handling pain is the most important thing to stop people going to the wrong places and we need more emphasis on pain clinics and pain advice.
“People see me as a councillor hobbling about on sticks and say ‘well, if you can’t get sorted how can we get sorted?’”
Mrs Orr’s comments came following a report presented by Dr Sohail Bhatti, NHS Borders Director of Public Health, to a meeting of full council.
The report revealed the cost to the Borders per person of obesity is approximately £1,500.
This translates to £3.3m in healthcare costs, and around £165 million in total costs for the Scottish Borders, 75 per cent of these costs related to quality-of-life issues.
Dr Bhatti responded: “We are looking at the pain pathway and I would say honestly that we don’t necessarily manage pain particularly well in the way we measure outcomes.
“Getting people re-engaged and active through social prescribing tends to mitigate some of the pain people feel or the need for prescriptions beyond things like paracetamol.”
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