Managing Chronic Pain: Should You Start with Opioids or Nonopioids?

In a step to address the dearth of clinical research on opioid therapy for chronic pain, a new long-term study finds no advantages to opioid medications over nonopioids for the management of pain from hip or knee osteoarthritis or chronic back pain. Lead author Erin Krebs, MD, MPH, with the...

Back and Spinal Pain--Where do Interventional Procedures Apply?

Spinal pain is very difficult to diagnose, the more so as patients get older. They present with different things on their MRI, different findings on exam, and they’ve had chronic pain for many years. Unfortunately, a lot of the physical exam and history findings are very generalizable, so it’s hard...

Fine-Tuning Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Chronic Pain

Cognitive behavioral therapies (CBT) have been proven to be effective alternate treatment modalities for patients with chronic pain, but shortcomings in existing programs may be limiting their efficacy in the patient populations most in need. In an address last week to the American Pain Society...

Reducing Medication Burden While Managing Chronic Pain

Per the department of Health and Human Services, opioid related overdose deaths have increased almost 400% over the last 18 years. This shift has yielded heightened scrutiny of prescribing practices, and opioids have subsequently fallen out of favor as a first-line treatment for chronic pain. In...

Men, Women, and Chronic Pain: New Research May Explain the Difference

Differences in the experience of pain for men and women have been explored for many years at PAINWeek®, and findings from a new study conducted by the Pain Neurobiology Group at the University of Texas at Dallas provide further insight. Working with mouse models, researchers found that a targeted...

The Psychology of Pain: For Patients and Practitioners

In terms of biopsychosocial treatment, providers must know that it’s critically important to look at all the factors that are affecting a patient’s pain condition. Any time we pigeonhole ourselves in any one category--whether it’s the medical piece, the psychological piece, or the physical piece--we...

Can a Failed Osteoarthritis Drug Have Other Pain Management Uses?

Although human trials of a new compound developed by Eli Lily and Co. for the treatment of osteoarthritis failed to demonstrate efficacy, the drug may still have substantial utility in the pain management armamentarium. Findings from a study conducted by researchers from Indiana University suggest...

Abuse Deterrent Technologies to Minimize Opioid Abuse

Although opioids remain an important tool in aiding the management of pain in the United States, the balance between the potential benefits and harms must be considered. Some specific harms are manifested in the abuse of opioids for nonmedical purposes. The primary access to prescribable opioids for...

Fighting Chronic Pain from Sickle Cell Disease

The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, the third largest Institute of the National Institutes of Health, has announced the awarding of a $4.6 million grant to researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The grant will be used to study the molecular neurobiology of pain in patients...

The 5th Vital Sign and Pain Scores

I think we have to go back to before a lot of these scores, before the fifth vital sign was pain management. How did we treat patients before we had all these medications, interventions, surgeries at our disposal that were meant to help pain. I think a lot of what we're applying to chronic pain...