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WHO WILL TREAT YOUR CHRONIC PAIN

Are You Seeing Gaps In Chronic Pain Management Care?

HCP shortages in primary care and rheumatology have adversely impacted Chronic Pain Management such as for headaches, fibromyalgia & back pain which takes place in every primary care office.

We need to adequately manage Chronic Pain!

The US is facing a shortage of physicians in all Specialties … but particularly in primary care and in non procedure – based medical and specialties including Rheumatology, However primary care physicians has increased by about 10% in the past 10 years but it can not keep pace with the general population. Size increase with a decrease from 47/100.000 to 42/100.000 during those 10years the decrease is seen mostly in rural areas.

Experts predict further shortage of 50,000 primary care providers (PCPs)in the next 20 years ...

As the general population lives longer. We are seeing a significant increase in Arthritis diagnosis, Inflammatory disease with an expected 30 to 50% increase in RA disease in the next 15 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!

New Statistics show that more than 100 Autoimmune Disease fall into this category.
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!
Rheumatologist have not considered themselves to be a pain Doctor. Although pain is the most important symptom of RA.
rheumatologist have focused on pain in the context of Inflammation/ Immune mechanism. Such as patients with related chronic pain conditions.

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? 

What it boils down to is … Taking time to evaluate these patients with chronic pain,
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.

Help your patients by using "The Healer" It will reduce the need for opioids! it will relieve pain and it's a stress- free treatment right in your office.

Reach out to us today to Lear more...