The National Pain Management Strategy to Inform Chronic Pain Disorders in Veterans and Civilians
Addressing chronic pain in veterans
Addressing chronic pain in veterans
In our previous article in the National Pain Strategy (NPS) series, we gave an overview of tools and approaches established at the Stanford Pain Management Center in order to improve pain management. The Chief of the Division of Pain Medicine at Stanford University, Sean Mackey, MD, PhD, presented NPS studies conducted at the Center, during the…
Cross-disciplinary collaborations for chronic pain
The Oversight Committee for the NIH Health and Human Services National Pain Strategy’s agenda sets objectives for 6 main areas of pain care and management.
🎥 Dr James Campbell’s team is developing safe, non-addictive and effective therapies to treat chronic pain using a big data approach, and focusing on osteoarthritis, chronic low back pain and headache.
Setting patient expectations of early pain relief may help influence treatment outcomes.
🎥 The long-established ‘Pain Catastrophizing Scale’ takes magnification, rumination and helplessness into account. Researchers at the University of Alabama considered additional measures of negative cognition associated with pain to reach a ‘global catastrophizing measure’.
🎥 Psychosocial variables to help predict pain levels in patients with mixed chronic pain conditions and similar demographics and socioeconomic backgrounds.
🎥 University of Alabama researchers use a psychosocial approach to the management of pain, by instructing patients to leverage their thoughts and feelings to improve their pain experience, and by establishing a relationship of trust between the patient and their healthcare provider.
As the research of Dr Colloca suggests, any pain treatment, in order to be effective, needs to take the psychosocial context into account.