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A glimmer of hope in American pain medicine?
Authors Schatman M
Received 23 June 2016
Accepted for publication 23 June 2016
Published 13 July 2016 Volume 2016:9 Pages 509—513
Michael E Schatman
US Pain Foundation, Bellevue, WA, USA
Over the past 8 years, I have acquired a degree of notoriety relating to my scathing criticism of the badly broken American pain care system. In the three-part series on the crisis in pain care in the United States that I coauthored with Dr Jim Giordano in 2008,1-3 we performed an ethical analysis of our system, examining the need for a paradigmatic revision if we were to adequately treat a disease as complex as is chronic pain, given the system's economic realities. Due to the insurance and hospital industries' adherence to the "business ethic" of cost-containment and profitability (as opposed to patient well-being), we were witnessing the profound undertreatment of pain in conjunction with a growing reliance upon technophilism, ie, an emphasis on technologically driven pain care sorely lacking a reasonable evidence-basis. Early in the following decade, Dr Alan Lebovits and I guest-edited a special series in Pain Medicine on the unfortunate devolution of the "profession" of pain medicine to the "business" of pain medicine.4
Disclosure
The author reports no conflicts of interest in this work.
References
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