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Interprofessional education (IPE) has primary goals: to improve outcomes; to reach the population in a healthcare setting where teams can actually provide cost-effectiveness to lower our healthcare costs; and to reach unreached areas. We do the latter with teams: in the interprofessional education...
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Biobehavioral treatments are a great addition to the toolkit that primary care providers already have. Not only can they help with managing the pain condition, they can help with all sorts of associated symptoms like depression and anxiety, frustration and lack of self-efficacy, as well as with...
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I’m not sure if odd is necessarily the right word. They’re odd in the sense that not everyone gets them after these certain types of surgeries. It’s only a subset of patients that tend to get long sequelae of pain after these surgeries. So I guess in that way, it’s odd, but they are actually pretty...
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Odd neuropathic pain disorders are a problem in the United States and across the world. Some of the more common ones that we tend to see are post mastectomy syndrome, post thoracotomy syndrome, and post inguinal hernia repair syndrome. They’re typically considered neuropathic pain states. They’re...
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When we consider the 50 billion brain cells and trillions of connections that are involved in the experience of pain, it’s preposterous to think that administering a pill or a series of pills or a patch is really going to change the environment substantially. There are so many ways to impact that...
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About 10 years ago I wrote a paper with Ken Kirsh and Howard Heit about how every stakeholder from the clinician to the patient, to the media, to law enforcement, regulators, could all work together to improve the state of affairs in pain management and the fate of people with pain. It was Ken Kirsh...
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What I have found in the research as well as from my clinical experience has been that adolescents are often paired with pediatric and geriatric populations in the studies as well as treatment. But adolescents differ in many ways on biopsychosocial and spiritual levels. Biologically, the brain is...
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You know, as healthcare providers, we all want to help our patients and we trust that the system is honest. The problem is that the system is not always honest, and we see both counterfeit medical delivery as well as counterfeit medications. The problem is much larger than just the few cases that...
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Methadone is an outstanding analgesic. It has a long half-life which can be very tricky of course, but it gives the patient the flexibility of only having to take their analgesic twice a day. It also has multiple mechanisms of action over and above the other opioids. It’s a mu receptor agonist but...
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Worker’s Compensation patients differ from the average group health claim. Most people on Worker’s Compensation have had some kind of a physical injury that has led to a chronic pain condition. Whereas in group health claims for pain therapy it’s much more focused on management of diseases of either...