WHO WILL TREAT YOUR CHRONIC PAIN
Are You Seeing Gaps In Chronic Pain Management Care?
We need to adequately manage Chronic Pain!
Experts predict further shortage of 50,000 primary care providers (PCPs)in the next 20 years ...
However most PCPs have neither the time nor training to adequately care for individuals with chronic pain conditions.
One obvious solution would be to refer patients to pain specialist. However there are only about 5,000 Pain Specialists in the US today – which averages out to one Pain Specialist For Every 29,000 Americans Suffering From Chronic Pain!
You can imagine ( during the Opioid crisis) the chaos when the State tried to take the PCPs ability away to write pain medication scripts for extremely ill patients! Sending everyone running to a pain specialist that were all ready over crowded with patients!
In 1997 an article was written in a leading rheumatology journal ” Fibromyalgia: scourge of humankind or bane of a rheumatologist existence.”
You can see in the long term forecast with the rheumatology health care shortages , it is likely that rheumatologist will be ever more resistant to taking primary responsibility for managing pain… A Question Has Been Posed: Do you treat Fibromyalgia in your practice or refer back to PCP after ruling out autoimmune inflammatory pathology?
And that is a lengthy process for any physician and not many options for treatment.
Today Chronic Pain Management has not been considered an important element of rheumatology practice. It’s time Health Care Insurance Companies and Health Care Services come together and evaluate this growing concern in our Community’s across the US.