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Therapeutic neuroscience education is helping patients to understand chronic pain from a neurophysiology perspective. It teaches patients very basic things about the physiology of our nervous system, how the brain gets involved in producing pain, and helps people to understand exactly what changes...
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I think that autonomy is very important when we’re looking at issues of adherence. In this country for the most part, people with pain are treated not particularly well, in my opinion, and as a bioethicist, I really struggle with that. Treatment agreements, also oftentimes called opioid contracts...
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Some people would say that evidence-based and CAM can’t go in the same sentence, but there have been a fair number of studies on complimentary alternative medicine or CAM. I think that it’s important for people to know that there are effective therapies from the CAM toolbox, and I would group them...
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One of the challenges with pain is we just don’t have enough clinicians who are trained, relative to the number of patients needing care. So initially we thought of the group as a way that we can make better use of our scarce resources. But what we found is that the groups took on a life of their...
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Our goal, as part of the multidisciplinary team, is to help patients who have pain issues, treat them compassionately, treat them effectively, minimize the burden to the patient, minimize the burden to the family, maintain functional independence and help prevent damage to the community at large...
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Treatment of neuropathic pain requires a multidisciplinary plan made up of multiple components. It requires a personalized strategy that engages psychological approaches, procedural approaches, complementary or alternative medicine techniques, physical and occupational therapies, and then also...
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The Iceberg Cometh
Dr. Passik is Director, Clinical Addiction Research and Education, Millenium Laboratories Clinical Education, San Diego, California. He has over 25 years’ experience in clinical practice as a pain psychologist specializing in addiction medicine. He is also a longtime member of...
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Leonard Kish coined the phrase that patient engagement is a blockbuster drug of the 21st century. What research has shown is that if you have engaged patients, you’re going to have better satisfaction, fewer medical errors, and better outcomes. Patients follow the regime of the treatment plan better...
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Prescription drug monitoring programs are a bit of an enigma. Some practitioners are intimately aware of their existence and some are not. Some aren’t clear on what their role is in managing patients with pain and others are. In the years from the end of the 90s to the late first decade of the 2...
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Urogenital pain affects at least 25% of reproductive age women. This includes interstitial cystitis, endometriosis, vulvodynia, and then also dyspareunia--a term for painful intercourse, which is really common not just in postmenopausal women, but in premenopausal women. As a physiatrist, I am...