Chronic pain patients are extremely difficult to treat. Whether they seek care from a family practitioner or a specialist, often times the individual is unable to conceptualize the nature of their problem and provide adequate treatment to help these individuals. In part, CTPM leaders believe that larger relates to the education that health care providers, nationwide, have received through their training. In a typical physicians’ curriculum, there is very little exposure to pain and pain mechanisms. There’s an educational barrier that ultimately equates to an inability to treat – not necessarily poor treatment but a poor understanding of how to treat patients with chronic pain.
In an effort to create pain education at both physician and patient levels, the Center for Translational Pain Medicine strives to:
- Raise public awareness and increase patient understanding about human pain conditions and how that impacts one’s physical, emotional, and economic health and wellness
- Train professionals across specialties how to recognize and accurately diagnose acute and chronic pain conditions
- Provide clinical instruction to current and future health care providers in examination methods, interview techniques, and therapeutic tools for the treatment and management of pain
- Increase the number of health professionals having advanced expertise in pain care
- Lead a national effort to decrease dependence on opioids and other addictive compounds
- Collaborate with providers, payers, practice managers, and practitioners of complementary medicine and alternative therapies to integrate these techniques into mainstream health care
- Provide opportunities for training in biomedical research, focusing on persistent and overlapping pain conditions