Researchers Provide Update in Pain Medicine

More than 75 million Americans suffer with chronic pain. Pain accounts for 20 percent of all outpatient visits, over $100 billion dollars per year in direct and indirect costs while analgesics account for 12 percent of all prescriptions.

In an effort to provide generalist physicians with the most current literature and data on chronic pain management for their patients, researchers from BUSM and BMC performed a review of peer-reviewed pain literature from January 1, 2008 through December 31, 2009 and selected, reviewed and summarized the ten pain-related articles during this time period which they felt would have the greatest impact on generalist’s care of patients suffering from chronic pain. These findings currently appear on-line in the Journal of General Internal Medicine.

The researchers divided their review into seven major sections: Assessment, Collaborative Care, Chronic Pain and Depression, Opioids and Chronic Pain, Cannabis and Chronic Pain, Complementary and Alternative Treatments and Treatment for Specific Types of Chronic Pain. Each article summary was followed by a paragraph entitled “implications for practice” which described how the study’s findings could change generalist practice.

According to the researchers their aim for this article, which was presented earlier this year at the annual meeting of the Society of General Internal Medicine, was to review recent pain medicine studies and their key findings, and to discuss the implications of these findings for generalist in clinical practice. “As generalists we often care for patients with chronic pain but are poorly trained in chronic pain management and are unfamiliar with the current literature as it is often published in specialty journals,” said lead author Daniel Alford, MD, MPH, an associate professor of medicine at BUSM. “It is our hope and belief that this review of pain literature will prove invaluable to generalist physicians and more importantly to their patients,” he added.