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For the last decade or longer, we’ve been talking about the challenges with opioids, and they are a challenging class of drug. On the one hand, they’re great at treating severe levels of pain; they may be the only class of medicine that works for severe pain. But there’s a lot of baggage...
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Motivational interviewing is a patient centered, collaborative style of communication that represents one tool to help clinicians overcome the challenges of conversations surrounding opioid tapers. MI can help strengthen motivation and interest in health behavior change. With regard to initiating an...
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With respect to treating Complex Regional Pain Syndrome, we have had to deal with almost strict empiricism; people just used what they thought worked and what they were comfortable with. Of course, being a researcher, I was always ‘we need better evidence and more data.’ One of the hurdles against...
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Children with complex medical challenges and/or intellectual or developmental disabilities present special problems for clinicians in diagnosing and assessing chronic pain. A new study published in the current edition of the American Journal of Nursing examines these difficulties and proposes...
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Sexual pain affects almost 20% of women across the world and in the United States somewhere between 8% and 20% depending on who you read. It’s been associated with a lot of physical disability, sexual dysfunction, psychiatric disability and excessive healthcare costs. The problem is because it’s...
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I think the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction. In the early 2000s, there was this increase in opioid prescribing and use that has led us to the predicament we’re in now with the opioid abuse and misuse epidemic, as they’re calling it. And now no one wants to prescribe them. For our...
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Urine toxicology is actually a big business in many fields of medicine, not just pain management. A lot of healthcare facilities, critical care units, emergency departments utilize tox screening as well. As of 2015, it was close to a 5 billion dollar business. A lot of new companies are offering...
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Overdose--a small word that packs a major punch, and a big reason for many recent legal regulatory changes in controlled substance prescribing and pain management. Too many physicians and allied healthcare practitioners are caught unawares by the legal issues surrounding overdose events, fatal and...
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NSAID use around the time of conception can significantly increase the risk of miscarriage during the first 8 weeks of pregnancy, according to conclusions from a new study conducted by researchers from Kaiser Permanente Northern California in Oakland. The work supports existing evidence that NSAIDs...
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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...