Health Team
Specialist support may offer relief from chronic pain
Chronic pain interferes with a patient’s mental health, ability to work and ability to relate to other people at times, according to Dr. Stephen Dobscha, of the Portland VA Medical Center in Oregon.
Posted — UpdatedYour browser doesn't support HTML5 video.
Most people have pain for a short time, but some suffer from chronic pain, which can last for 12 weeks or more.
Chronic pain interferes with a patient’s mental health, ability to work and ability to relate to other people at times, according to Dr. Stephen Dobscha, a psychiatrist at the Portland Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Oregon.
Your browser doesn't support HTML5 video.
Most chronic-pain patients go to primary-care doctors, instead of chronic pain specialists. Researchers at the Portland VA Medical Center looked at whether a treatment method called collaborative care may be more effective.
“What you see in a collaborative intervention is adding what's called a decision-support team or some experts to the primary-care setting to help primary-care providers deliver the best care,” Dobscha said.
Researchers followed two groups of veterans with musculoskeletal pain for one year. One group continued seeing a primary-care doctor without the additional education or specialist support offered to the second group of patients.
In the second group, specialists developed a personal treatment plan and charted patients' progress on functional goals.
The second group experienced modest improvements in functioning and less pain.
“We were able to do it in a population that was older and that had very long-standing pain on average and who had multiple medical problems,” Dobscha said.
Researchers said the results reinforced the idea that a collaborative-care approach is more effective in treating a variety of chronic conditions.
• Credits
Copyright 2024 JAMA. All rights reserved.