An important mission of the hospital is the relief of suffering and that includes relief of pain. Pain management programs are central to fulfilling this mission. The past decade has taught us that you cannot effectively manage pain with an opioid prescription alone. The combination of opioid addiction plus the COVID-19 pandemic has proven to be lethal for many Americans. Last year, there were 100,306 drug overdose deaths in the United States, up by 28.5% from the 78,056 overdose deaths in the previous year. The vast majority of these deaths were caused by natural or synthetic opioids and for many of these people, their addiction started with a pain medication initially prescribed by a doctor.
In the 1990’s, “Pain as the 5th vital sign” was the mantra of pain management services with the implication that physicians were not prescribing enough opioids and that it was our moral duty to prescribe more. The consequence of this campaign was that many of our patients became opioid-dependent. When we realized this, the pendulum swung the other way, with state medical boards restricting the amount and duration of opioid prescriptions that doctors could order. As a result, the supply of prescription opioids fell dramatically and the opioid-dependent population turned to illegal opioids. Coincident with this, inexpensive synthetic fentanyl became readily available on our streets and many Americans died of unintentional overdose due to the unpredictable concentrations of fentanyl in purchased quantities of street drugs.
The good news, is that we have a number of great alternatives to opioid pain medications for both acute and chronic pain management. However, a high-functioning hospital needs to have more than just one of these pain management services.
What is pain, anyhow?
Pain exists when our peripheral nerves let us know that a part of the body is being injured. This is a great defense mechanism to avoid bodily harm, for example, pain is how we know to pull our hand away when we touch a hot stove. But pain can become pathologic when those pain nerves keep firing even though there is no avoidable injury – for example, the patient with bone metastases from cancer, the patient hospitalized after multiple trauma, the patient with chronic arthritis, or the patient recovering from a knee replacement surgery. In those situations, the pain nerves just keep firing away and there is nothing that the person can do by themself to make those nerves stop.
But there is a lot more to the perception of pain than just signal from a peripheral nerve. There are pain amplifiers that can turn the volume of pain up. The most important of these are fear, anxiety, and depression. Often, the presence of one of these modifiers can convert tolerable pain into intolerable pain.
What pain management services does the hospital need?
Comprehensive pain management does not boil down to having a single pain management service. Hospitals need to have a spectrum of options for treating pain in order to do the most good for the most people. All too often, the physicians or advance practice providers who are proficient with one type of pain management option are not proficient with other options.
- Acute pain services. These are inpatient providers, frequently anesthesiologists, nurse anesthetists, pharmacists, and/or nurse practitioners. These providers are very good at managing temporary pain, particularly post-operative pain and trauma-related pain. They will have experience in managing pain pumps and in selecting opioid and non-opioid pain medications that are meant to be used for limited numbers of hours or days. A larger hospital can afford to maintain an acute pain service but the low patient volume at a smaller hospital may make an acute pain management service cost-prohibitive. In order to serve our smaller, urban hospital, we created an acute pain telemedicine consultation service with providers located at our larger, tertiary care hospital located on the other side of town.
- Pain and palliative care services. These are providers who may work in either inpatient or outpatient areas and typically focus more on chronic pain management. They are usually physicians who have completed a palliative medicine fellowship who lead a team that may include nurse practitioners, physician assistants, pharmacists, and social workers. Cancer-related pain and sickle cell anemia-related pain are examples of their clinical focus. Although chronic opioid prescription may be a part of their practice, they will also typically address pain modifiers, such as fear and depression.
- Interventional pain services. These are physicians who have done fellowship training in interventional pain management and most commonly draw from anesthesiology, physical medicine & rehabilitation, and neurology. Their practice is generally outpatient and many include steroid injections, radiofrequency ablation, intrathecal pumps, sympathetic blocks, peripheral nerve stimulators, and spinal stimulators. They will often interface with outpatient therapies such as physical therapy, aqua therapy, and psychology. The procedures that they perform often require use of the operating room or an imaging area such as a cath lab or interventional radiology lab. Many of their procedures are done using moderate sedation but some may require general anesthesia.
- Sports medicine. These are family physicians, internists, or pediatricians who have done fellowship training in sports-related injuries and over-use injuries. Despite the name, sports medicine physicians treat many patients who are not athletes. They will often interface with physical therapists, athletic trainers, and orthopedic surgeons when directing specific treatments for injuries accompanied by pain.
- Complementary and alternative medicine. This includes a wide variety of services such as acupuncture, massage therapy, chiropractic treatments, yoga, and traditional Chinese medicine. Although physicians may be involved in alternative medicine, many of these providers are non-physicians. Many hospital medical directors take a jaded view of alternative medicine. However, these services can often de-amplify pain by reducing anxiety and fear. They can also provide a sense of control to patients with chronic pain that can make pain much more manageable. Regardless of what the hospital medical director may think, if the patient believes that these services work, then they can be beneficial.
- Inpatient physicians. Hospitalists, surgeons, and anesthesiologists are the first-line of pain management for most inpatients. However, the formal training that they get in pain management is highly variable. Clinical practice guidelines and treatment protocols can be very useful to ensure a hospital-wide standard of practice. Periodic continuing medical education events are also valuable. One of the most important roles of these physicians is to manage pain expectations. If patients are told that they are going to have post-operative pain before they actually have their surgery and they are told that their pain will be manageable with non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs and physical therapy, then those patients are less likely to require opioids post-operatively compared to patients who go into surgery unprepared to experience any pain after surgery.
- Outpatient physicians. Primary care physicians, surgeons, and emergency medicine physicians are the front-line of pain management for most outpatients. Once again, their formal training in pain management can be highly variable and so just as for inpatient physicians, clinical practice guidelines, treatment protocols, and periodic continuing medical education are usually necessary. Most state medical boards have state-specific rules and regulations regarding chronic opioid prescription and it can be very difficult for the primary care physician to ensure that all of the monitoring and documentation requirements are met. A robust electronic medical record can help with this. But if there is a critical mass of patients receiving chronic opioid medications, an advanced practice provider dedicated to chronic, stable-dose opioid management can be cost-effective.
In addition to pain services that manage a spectrum of conditions, there are also disease-specific specialists needed to manage certain conditions. Migraine (often managed by neurologists) and fibromyalgia (often managed by rheumatologists) are two examples. Having a physician on the hospital medical staff who specializes in these conditions can help avoid primary care physicians ordering opioids out of frustration.
Match the patient with the pain service
Although there is frequently a lot of overlap between different types of pain services, to optimally meet the needs of the most patients, all seven of the above pain services need to be available – if not in each hospital, then at least somewhere in the community. No two patients are exactly alike when it comes to pain tolerance and pain perception. Treating fibromyalgia with chronic opioids just doesn’t work. Nor does bone metastasis pain with physical therapy. We should strive to match the patient’s type of pain with the right type of pain service.
Our natural tendency as humans is to use whatever tool we are familiar with to fix whatever problem we face (“When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail”). When it comes to pain management, be sure that your hospital has a full toolbox.
February 19, 2022
