| Article
Approximately 1 billion people in the world are affected with migraine and the thought is that about 40% of them that are candidates for some type of preventative therapy. A sizable proportion of that 40% doesn’t actually receive the kind of preventative therapy that they need, and so that equates...
| Podcast
Lower back pain is the most common reason to see a physician for pain and the number one cause of disability. Some patients with lower back pain eventually require spinal surgery. Unfortunately, 20% to 40% of these patients will develop failed back surgery syndrome (FBSS or FBS) after the first...
| Article
The terms prescribing guidelines and prescribing rules are often used interchangeably although they really have separate meanings. Guidelines, by their nature, are voluntary recommendations. Whereas prescribing rules are mandatory. It’s important for prescribers to be aware of what exactly the rules...
| Podcast
Behavioral and psychological interventions for pain management have often been included in patient care as a last resort, a place to turn to when biomedical interventions fail to yield sustained amelioration in pain symptoms. Such an approach disregards research which has long suggested that patient...
| Article
Practitioners need to understand that there are steps that they should be taking to minimize the potential of a bad legal outcome in the event of an investigation involving an overdose.
The liability for an overdose event tracks back to the practitioner’s adherence to licensing board requirements...
| Podcast
Despite high prevalence and seemingly continuous attention, the clinical challenges associated with assessing, treating, and managing patients with chronic pain continue to persist. Many different forces are at play and responsible for this frequently frustrating situation and, as is often the case...
| Article
If I ask patients how satisfied they are with their pain treatment, I think there’s an inverse correlation with whether they’re on opioids or not; and the higher the dose of opioids, the less satisfied they are. In general, I don’t think that they’re a great treatment. I think they’re reserved for a...
| Article
Headache, by itself, is just a symptom. It’s like saying someone has arm pain; there are many causes of arm pain. There are over 300 different causes of headache; some of them are threatening, secondary headaches; some of them are not threatening but problematic--those are primary headaches. Once...
| Article
Is naloxone the silver bullet? Well maybe the silver bullet du jour. I think the biggest challenges with respect to naloxone are the educational hurdles because unlike the EpiPen, naloxone is intended to be administered by someone else not the patient. So that means that the burden of determining an...
| Podcast
Many patients receiving opioids will need to be switched from one to another during therapy or at least from one dosage formulation or route of administration to another. During this session, practitioners learn to recognize clinical situations in which opioid switching would be appropriate...