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Transformative care is as much about training and treatments as it is about using a team to work with the patients. Most of the pain clinics have followed this protocol very well. But still, there is an overemphasis on passive treatments as the primary care strategy for these patients. In actuality...
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Much of the publicity today, as well as initiatives like the CDC guidelines, really focus on the outpatient problems with chronic pain patients. But there’s a growing concern with how we prescribe opioids for post-op pain control. There is a fair amount of literature that’s emerging about whether...
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Transformative care is a strategy to really improve the care for patients with pain. It basically means integrating training of patients with treatment of patients. Evidence-based treatments work very well, slightly above placebo, and work fairly well short term, but most patients don’t want to be...
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I think it’s important for primary care providers or anyone taking care of chronic pain patients to realize that the central nervous system plays a very prominent role in pain processing. In many individuals, in whom we see that the central nervous system is amplifying their pain, the brain is also...
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Being Aware of Pain, Instead of Being Distracted From It
It may seem counterintuitive, but meditating into pain as opposed to trying to distract from it can be beneficial to people in pain. A former Buddist monk and current Chief Zen Officer explains that focusing on pain, but not judging it, can...
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The landscape for prescribers is changing today. Many state licensing boards are adopting new rules or guidelines. Many of them are looking at the CDC guidelines and trying to figure out do they need to incorporate them. Prescribers really need to understand what their licensing boards are doing and...
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A common question is how do you manage acute pain in folks with chronic pain and opioid tolerance. It’s similar to the general principles, and using plan of care, multimodal analgesia, having in a professional team, understanding what the goals are realistically in terms of recovery, not just...
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In surveys that have been done, 95 percent of the drugs that are used to control acute postoperative pain are opioid-based and that’s been done for many years. There is a general movement through the anesthesia and surgical community to what’s known as enhanced recovery after surgery, or ERAS. There...
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It’s pretty remarkable that mindfulness meditation can be more powerful than morphine. Morphine has been shown to, on average, reduce chronic pain by about 25%. Mindfulness meditation has been shown to, on average, reduce chronic pain by about 40% and in some cases up to 93% with short-term and...
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Certainly the idea of making an opioid safer is very desirable, and the current approach has been to address certain components of the way that these drugs are abused. Most of the products we have currently are focused at abuse through nasal snorting or through injection. We have technologies that...