Understanding the Big Picture of Pain and Pain Assessment

The number of opioid related deaths in the US is on the rise and health care providers (HCPs) often struggle finding a balance between prescribing guidelines and the individual needs of patients with acute and/or chronic pain. It’s imperative that clinicians seeing patients with pain are knowledgeable about acute and chronic pain pathways and underlying mechanisms so that they may appropriately assess and manage pain.

Biopsychosocial assessment tools such as PEG (Pain, Enjoyment of Life, General Activity) are important to determining underlying causes to a patient’s pain; while verbal and visual scales reveal a pain score, measuring things like anxiety, depression, and side effects of any medications can help determine a patient’s functionality and quality of life, making it less difficult for HCPs to treat a patient’s pain.

In this free CME Snack, Dr. Gold and Dr. Stanos highlight the importance of helping patients function better so that they can return to a normal day-to-day life and discuss pain assessment tools and risk stratification so clinicians can both augment top-down inhibition of pain and reduce catastrophic reactions in patients with chronic pain.

At the end of this CME/CE activity, participants should be able to:

• Apply knowledge of acute and chronic pain pathways and underlying mechanisms to clinical assessment and appropriate management of pain.
• Educate patients about their pain to optimize safe and effective, multimodal treatment plans.

The following learning objectives pertain only to those requesting CNE or CPE credit:

• Explain acute and chronic pain pathways and underlying mechanisms and how they relate to clinical assessment and appropriate management of pain.

Supported by an educational grant from Johnson & Johnson.

Physicians, physician assistants, nurse practitioners, nurses, and pharmacists.

It is the policy of CME Outfitters, LLC, to ensure independence, balance, objectivity, and scientific rigor and integrity in all of their CE activities. Faculty must disclose to the participants any relationships with commercial companies whose products or devices may be mentioned in faculty presentations, or with the commercial supporter of this CE activity. CME Outfitters, LLC, has evaluated, identified, and mitigated any potential conflicts of interest through a rigorous content validation procedure, use of evidence-based data/research, and a multidisciplinary peer review process.

Dr. Gold has no disclosures to report.

Dr. Stanos reports that he receives research support from Grunenthal and is a consultant for SCILEX Pharmaceuticals, Inc.

Disclosures were obtained from the CME Outfitters, LLC staff: No disclosures to report.

• Mae Ochoa, RPh (peer reviewer)
• Jan Perez (planning committee)
• Sharon Tordoff (planning committee)

Faculty of this CE activity may include discussions of products or devices that are not currently labeled for use by the FDA. The faculty have been informed of their responsibility to disclose to the audience if they will be discussing off-label or investigational uses (any uses not approved by the FDA) of products or devices.

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