| Article
Chronic pain patients tend to be a little older and that in and of itself leads to a decrease in quality of sleep. Loss of quality sleep makes the pain seem a little worse and more difficult to deal with. So how can we treat both pain and sleep issues to break that cycle? And to make matters even...
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What is medical marijuana? It depends on who you ask. If you ask heavy marijuana users, all marijuana is medical. If you ask the Food and Drug Administration, no marijuana is medical. It’s a very complex question because marijuana has 100-some odd constituents and the attention seems to be all about...
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The endocannabinoid system is something that most primary care physicians really have never heard of, and it’s a shame because the endocannabinoid 1 receptor is really the single most densely populated G-protein coupled 7 transmembrane domain receptor in the human brain. So why do we and all animal...
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New recommendations for the management of postpartum pain have been developed by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists' Committee on Obstetric Practice. Working in concert with the American College of Nurse-Midwives in Silver Spring, MD, and colleagues, the authors note that...
| Podcast
Traditional medical and rehabilitation training programs teach clinicians to frame an explanation of body pain in terms of anatomy and biomechanics. As intuitive as this may be, what we say is often not what patients hear. Research has demonstrated that use of common terms such as “degeneration,”...
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The barriers that we face when we tell patients they can learn to live with pain…they’re quite vast. There are some patients who say “I don’t want to live with pain. The pain has taken a lot out of my life and I don’t want to learn to live with it. I just want it gone.” That’s a significant barrier...
| Podcast
In order to successfully clinically manage pain, it is essential to begin with an understanding of the underlying mechanisms responsible for its generation. A skillful approach based upon better knowledge concerning the anatomical structures, pathways, and events that result in pain is more likely...
| Article
When we place a lot of resources upfront, such as employing physicians, psychiatrists, psychologists, physical therapists, yoga instructors, it does have a lot of start-up costs. But what we’re finding is we don’t know the status of our healthcare monetary appropriation. Right now it seems like from...
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There’s still room for improvement when it comes to patient and prescriber education about postsurgical pain management, according to a new study led by researchers from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Two key findings that emerged from the work were that patients are underusing...
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I think the unique concepts or unique problems that we have at the San Mateo County Medical Center is limitation of resources, first of all. There’s a limitation sometimes in the number of hours that we can have at our clinic, the total number of clinicians we can use, the number of hours in general...