Chronic Pain Patients Who Fail Standard Treatment

There is a group of intractable pain patients who have extensively accessed the pain treatment system only to be unable to find satisfactory pain relief. These patients have sought treatment at multiple academic centers and attempted numerous nonmedical, pharmacologic, and invasive interventions including surgery, implants, and intrathecal drugs. Our experience in a special unit for these patients will be presented. Only a few underlying painful conditions are found in this subgroup and patients tend to have profound genetic, metabolic defects and hormonal alterations. Special treatment regimens based on their unique clinical abnormalities have to be developed for these individuals. (Recorded at PAINWeek 2016)