'The science is in place. Why are so many suffering?'
Pain medicine physicians from the American Academy of Pain Medicine (AAPM) continued to advance the call for better pain care as they joined with physician leaders from across the country in a closed-door National Pain Summit that took place adjacent to an AMA meeting last week in Houston, Texas.
AAPM leaders have been vigilant in advocating for better pain care for patients. They released AAPM's Pain Medicine Position Paper documenting how to address the need for better pain care earlier this fall. More recently, they signed the Mayday Fund's Call to Revolutionize Chronic Pain Report, which demonstrates the disparity between patient suffering and the under-accessed pain care.
"The Pain Summit confirmed that the felt need for better pain care in America reaches across all medical fields. Every day, tens of millions of U.S. citizens are suffering from immobilizing pain that affects their jobs, their families, and their spirit; frankly, our doctors are often not trained well enough and our health care system is not organized appropriately to be able to help these patients. We can offer better care. We have the clinical science to start the process. But, funding is needed to educate patients and the public, to streamline medical systems, and to improve and standardize the education of medical students, the training of residents in all specialties, and the training of pain medicine specialists," AAPM President Rollin M. Gallagher, MD, MPH, explained.
The closed-door discussions in the Pain Summit were focused on several dominant themes:
- Better pain care is available for patients, but is not being accessed.
- Education on pain should be improved in medical schools, residency and fellowship programs, as well as in training programs for allied health workers.
- Additional funding needs to be made available for continued research in pain.
- A model of collaboration between primary care and specialty physicians should be evaluated and disseminated among physicians so patients can find the right physician to see for their pain.
- Consumers need to be told that better pain care is available and how to access it.
- Finally, the physician leaders uniformly agreed that changes have to be made within the structures of organized medicine to accommodate better pain care for patients, namely pain should be recognized as a specialty and pain should be treated as a disease.
The AMA Section Council Pain Summit was part of the pre-meeting activities of the AMA's Interim House of Delegates meeting in Houston, Texas, which takes place through Wednesday of this week. The Pain Summit was organized by the Pain and Palliative Medicine Specialty Section Council in response to Resolution 321, adopted by the American Medical Association House of Delegates in May of 2008 that expressed a strong commitment to better access and delivery of quality pain care through the promotion of enhanced research, education and clinical practice in the field of pain medicine.
In addition to over 28 prominent medical associations that participated in the overall summit process, representatives from the medical branches of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, and the United States Air Force, Army and Navy were present.