4 Reasons Why Our Patients go to Pain School
April 13, 2020Specialists In Pain Care requires all patients who are prescribed opioid pain medication to attend Pain School. Pain School is a regular medical appointment in a group format. We educate our patients on the following topics:
- Proper use of opioid pain medication
- Driving and work safety while taking opioid pain medication
- Tolerance, dependence and addiction
- The CDC Guidelines
There are 4 reasons why our patients go to Pain School.
Reason #1: Service. When most patients visit their doctors, they wait in the waiting room. They wait again in the exam room, and if they are lucky, they might get more than 10 minutes with their providers. This is not an efficient use of time. With Pain School, patients check in and 15 minutes later, class begins. Patients will not only learn from each other but they will learn from the moderator. In fact, after 60 minutes with the provider, most patients state that this was a good use of their time!
Reason #2: It’s the law! In 2012, the Commonwealth of Kentucky passed a law known as HealthCare Bill 1. This law set out to regulate pain clinics and scheduled medication in the Commonwealth. The law is administered by the Kentucky Board of Medical Licensure, and the exact language in the law is the following: “…it is the acceptable and prevailing medical practice within the Commonwealth of Kentucky for physicians prescribing or dispensing controlled substances to educate patients receiving controlled substances….”
Reason #3: It’s the demographics! Nearly 100 million adult Americans will raise their hand and state, “I live with chronic pain everyday”. This is nearly 40% of the adult population! Pain is the most common reason we go to the doctor. It costs the country $500 billion per year, and it exacts a huge toll on our patients’ quality of life. Despite chronic pain’s prevalence, it is often said that it is poorly treated (mostly because we have poor tools to diagnose and treat).
Reason #4: The Opioid Crisis. Patients should have an understanding of the origins of the opioid crisis. Over the past 30 years, physicians prescribed a lot of pain medication, yet patients were not really any healthier. Pain pill prescriptions are down nearly 45% from their 2011 highs, so today’s opioid crisis has little to do with their proper use of pain medication and what goes on in medical offices.
Our Pain School on opioid pain medication is not meant to put the fear in patients or even suggest that patients are doing something wrong. Our goal is to help patients understand the guidelines that we use to successfully manage their pain when employing modalities such as opioid pain medication.
The Specialists in Pain Care Team!
