A glimmer of hope in American pain medicine?

• Main Author: Schatman ME
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Dove Medical Press 2016-07-01
• Series: Journal of Pain Research
• Subjects: interdisciplinary; chronic pain; paradigmatic revision
• Online Access: https://www.dovepress.com/a-glimmer-of-hope-in-american-pain-medicine-peer-reviewed-article-JPR

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 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" 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.4