Clear, focused, and manageable short- and long-term goals are the hallmark of successful outcomes for multi-disciplinary pain management programs. Effective communication among all treatment personnel along with consistency is extremely important, ensuring that you will hear the same treatment philosophy and message from each of the treatment team members.

Although the evaluation and management of the patient with unremitting pain is very complex, it needs to be done in a sensitive and non-judgmental manner, with comprehensive knowledge of the relevant issues. Careful interviewing done in an emphatic fashion can help reveal how a person’s verbal constructions of his or her situation can motivate and drive what seems to be an incessant and fruitless search for ways to eliminate pain.

Developing a multidisciplinary pain treatment programme involves a thorough understanding of coordinating well-supported individual treatment approaches for chronic pain into an integrative program. As such, all of these variables need to be comprehensively addressed in order for treatment to be successful. The patient journey in a multidisciplinary pain clinic is one of change. Often one treatment will support and make possible another, for example analgesia and physical therapy. Hence, the necessity for individualized treatment regimes and regular review of patient progress.

The inherent difficulty of “curing” chronic pain goes against the traditional medical model of the doctor healing the patient. Lack of understanding can lead practitioners as well as patients to be overly aggressive in their approaches. Moreover, end-of-life issues pose enormously challenging ethical dilemmas for the pain practitioner. Pain is one of the common reasons for assisted suicide or euthanasia, placing the pain medicine doctor at the forefront of these very difficult issues.  A careful multi-disciplinary evaluation of the patient can be beneficial in solving these very perplexing problems.

Goals of treatment shift the focus to patients as active participants, helping to educate and empower them to take more active roles in treatment and enabling them to self-manage pain-related difficulties, pacing, goal setting, stress management, and problem solving. When successful rehabilitation occurs, there appears to be a cognitive shift— a shift from beliefs about helplessness and passivity to resourcefulness and ability to function regardless of pain. Clearly, in the context of multidisciplinary/interdisciplinary pain management, the whole is far greater than the sum of the individual parts.

Tweets at http://twitter.com/painfreeindia