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Back pain is one of the primary reasons patients end up seeing a physician, primary care doctors included. So I think it’s important to realize that you have to be very tenacious in diagnosing the actual cause of the pain because we don’t want to just treat the symptoms. It’s important to understand...
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Medical recordkeeping has the potential to be reduced to checkboxes: I’ve done this, I’ve done that, I’m good with the people who will review my records, so I’m done. But I think integrating the information in a meaningful fashion is the next level that we’re trying to get clinicians to go to. So in...
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NSAID therapy is really a complex topic, and is associated with a wide range of cautions and adverse effects, as is well known. Aspirin was really the first drug that was used as an NSAID, over a century ago. Of course, we know all these years later if aspirin came on the market now, it surely would...
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Catastrophizing is a set of negative cognitive and emotional responses to pain that encompasses factors like feelings of helplessness when in pain. People who catastrophize feel that there’s nothing they can do about the pain that they’re having. They ruminate about pain. They can’t get thoughts of...
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It turns out that psychological factors strongly correlate with prescription for opioids and also for opioid dose. Some of those factors are depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, and history of substance use disorder. So a person’s history and also their current psychological make-up...
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Personality is a fascinating aspect of our patients, and it really does highlight how people are different--not in a good or bad way, but in a way that has inherent strengths in one situation and inherent vulnerabilities or weaknesses in another situation. And so, when we’re talking about...
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Social media is the future of communications. You can use it for branding, for community outreach, and you can use it for patient education. The fastest growing segment of social media consumers is populations over the age of 50, and research shows one of the primary reasons to be because they are...
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Prescribers run afoul of the laws and regulations governing controlled substance prescribing in a couple of different ways but it often just boils down to documentation and a clear picture of the prescriber’s rationale for prescribing the controlled medication to a particular patient. A second...
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We don’t have very precise tools to evaluate the way the nervous system functions. We have electrophysiological studies like EMG and nerve conduction velocity assessments, but they’re often negative in people who have widespread or other localized pain complaints, and people have been told that that...
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Clinicians must be prepared to recognize that addiction is a disease and it’s a very serious and fatal disease, which is often written off as a weakness or poor moral character, or something like that. Only by recognizing it as a disease can they really help their patients through compassion...