Five Best Practices for Pain Management

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

1. Implement pain practices that are integrated. What really needs to happen in this country is that patients receive comprehensive treatment instead of just prescriptions for narcotics. The easiest way to treat a patient’s pain is to fill a prescription to minimize the time spent on the visit. However, the most effective method is to have a coordinated pain practice with collaborative efforts that include physical therapy, chiropractic treatment, pain physicians who can handle medication management, as well as performing interventional procedures.

2. Promotes dialogue between specialists. It’s one thing to have an integrated pain practice where there are multiple specialists treating patients that incorporate alternative and traditional medicine. But if those specialists don’t talk to each other about each patient, then it kind of defeats the purpose. With the various specialists talking to patients, they can also help facilitate education between the different specialties and improve outcomes.

3. Individualized treatment plans. What is most profitable for a pain center is not always the best for delivering results to patients managing pain. Each patient will need an exhaustive study to be able to make the most accurate diagnosis and establish an individualized treatment plan. What may work for one patient may be completely inappropriate for another, for example 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 showing that facet injections and epidural injections are effective for various painful conditions. However, they are not large-scale Level One evidence-type investigations, so more investigation is what needs to happen. But more research is also needed on better ways to treat pain with medication.

5. The world of technology is very well integrated with pain management. Over the past few years, interventional pain management procedures have risen sharply along with technology. Procedures such as radiofrequency ablation and spinal cord stimulation continue to improve technologically so that procedures take less time and have more effective outcomes for patients. This trend should continue over the next year.