Who should be treated in Pain Management?
Two groups of people benefit from pain management. The first group: in an ideal world, anyone who is experiencing ongoing pain without adequate relief from current treatment, even if the pain has only been present a few weeks (“acute pain”), should have a pain management physician involved in their treatment. Early in the course of pain, most types of pain respond quite well to adequate doses and scheduling of “pain medication”, usually opioids like hydrocodone, oxycodone, or morphine. The reason the pain needs to be controlled as soon as possible is that the longer pain remains uncontrolled, the more sensitized the pain nerve information system becomes to painful signals. At some unpredictable point, the part of the nervous system reporting pain becomes overwhelmed and recruits other parts of the nervous system, normally not giving pain information, to also start reporting pain. More pain highways and intersections are built, and just like new government programs, once built they are
