A glimmer of hope in American pain medicine?

A glimmer of hope in American pain medicine?

Blog Article

Michael E Schatman US Pain Foundation, Bellevue, WA, USAOver the past 8 years, I have acquired a degree of notoriety relating to my scathing criticism of the badly broken American pain care system.In the three-part series on the crisis in pain care in the United States that I coauthored with Dr Jim Gift Cards Giordano in 2008,1-3 we performed an ethical analysis of our system, examining the need for a paradigmatic revision if we were to adequately treat a disease as complex as is chronic pain, given the system's economic realities.Due to the insurance and hospital industries' adherence to the "business ethic" Lubricants of cost-containment and profitability (as opposed to patient well-being), we were witnessing the profound undertreatment of pain in conjunction with a growing reliance upon technophilism, ie, an emphasis on technologically driven pain care sorely lacking a reasonable evidence-basis.Early in the following decade, Dr Alan Lebovits and I guest-edited a special series in Pain Medicine on the unfortunate devolution of the "profession" of pain medicine to the "business" of pain medicine.

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