Integrative Pain Medicine

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Chronic pain disables almost 50 million Americans, and is one of the most under-treated conditions in modern health care. The elderly are most affected by pain, and often take multiple medications that have unexamined potential for interaction. Thus, as our population ages, non-pharmaceutical approaches to pain management will be of great value to internists, geriatricians, reheumatologists, oncologist and all those involved with older patients. Recent studies have also demonstrated that the primary reason people use complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) is for pain. Yet, very little is taught about conventional pain medicine at either the undergraduate or post-graduate levels, and even less about how common CAM therapies can appropriately be woven into the clinical practice of modern pain medicine. While there are a few isolated and generally short programs on CAM for pain offered at national pain meetings, there has not been a complete and comprehensive conference on the state-of-the-science of pain medicine, focusing on an integrated approach to pain medicine. We propose to meet this need through a new conference: "Integrative Pain Medicine." The purpose of this unique and much needed program will be to give an overview of the evidence base for pain medicine in an integrative model that combines current conventional medicines with the best of CAM therapies. The presenters will be asked to critically review the current scientific literature justifying the various therapies for pain, and to clearly describe the state-of-the-science. The audience will be practicing clinicians who deal with pain. The Specific Aims of the conference are to: Describe the fundamentals of modern pain medicine; Describe some of the best conventional and CAM therapies for use in pain management; Present research data to support conventional and CAM therapies for pain; Enable clinicians to know how to identify and evaluate competent CAM practioners and have a sense of how to interact with them; and Present information on the practical integration of useful CAM therapies into the treatment of pain patients with and without cancer.