The Five Best Pain Management Practices

Pain in the United States is a verifiable epidemic. Narcotic abuse is at an all-time high and pain in America costs well over $500 billion annually. In looking at the world of pain medicine, what are the 5 best practices for pain management to help move our country towards more effective outcomes?

1. Put in place pain practices that are integrated. What really needs to happen in this country is for patients to receive comprehensive type treatments rather than simply narcotic prescriptions. The easiest way to treat a patient's pain is to fill a prescription to minimize time spent on the visit. However, the most effective method is to have a coordinated pain practice with collaborative efforts including physical therapy, chiropractic treatment, pain doctors who can handle medication management, as well as perform interventional procedures.

2. Encourage dialogue between specialists. It's one thing to have an integrated pain practice where you have multiple specialists treating the patients incorporating alternative as well as traditional medicine. But if those specialists don't talk to each other about each patient, then it slightly defeats the purpose. With the various specialists discussing the patients, they can also help facilitate education among the different specialties and improve outcomes.

3. Individualized treatment plans. What is most profitable for a pain center is not always what is the best for providing outcomes to pain management patients. Each patient will necessitate a comprehensive workup so that the most accurate diagnosis can be made and an individualized treatment plan put in place. What may work for one patient may be completely inappropriate for another such as if a patient has fibromyalgia it might be inappropriate to incorporate deep tissue massage.

4. We need more research on interventional pain procedures. There is some research that exists showing that facet injections and epidural injections are effective for various pain conditions. However they are not large-scale Level One evidence type research so what needs to happen is more research. But also needs to be more research into better ways of treating pain with medication.

5. The world of technology is nicely integrated with pain management. As the last few years have gone by, interventional pain management procedures have elevated nicely along with technology. Procedures such as radiofrequency ablation and spinal cord stimulation continue to improve technologically so that the procedures take less time and are more effective outcomes for patients. This trend should continue over the next year.