This week I’m at Valley Forge Medical Center (VFMC) and hospital in Norristown PA for our second of three APM™ Center of Excellence site visits and a three day staff training that they generously opened up to the professional community for the Relapse Prevention Counseling Certification School. VFMC is committed to becoming the first APM™ Center of Excellence and are well on their way to full designation.

The final Designation for VFMC will be the week of June 8th of this year.  At that time we will conduct the final site visit evaluation and present them with the full Center of Excellence Designation. Also during that visit I will conduct the three day Addiction-Free Pain Management® Certification Training on June 10-12, for the staff and again VFMC has genrousely opened this training to the public. For more information please go to our Calendar Page and scroll down for information or to register.

The Addiction-Free Pain Management® System uses as its foundation a multidisciplinary collaborative teamwork approach that includes the patient as an integral part of the team. One of the primary goals of APM™ is to provide concurrent treatment for someone with chronic pain and coexisting disorders including addiction using an evidenced-based manualized treatment approach.

Our mission is to collaborate with treatment providers who are committed to fully implement the Addiction-Free Pain Management® (APM) System. Our commitment is to recognize, support and help our APM™ Centers of Excellence (COE) partners reach as many people as possible with chronic pain and coexisting disorders who need and deserve state-of-the-art treatment.

Many treatment providers have asked me why they should go through all the time, effort and money to earn this designation when they can simply send staff to my APM™ Certification trainings and use my existing books with their clients. This is an excellent question and I invite you to review the information on our Center of Excellence page to see if the APM™ Center of Excellence is of interest to your agency. If you are interested please contact us to move to the next stage where we will send you a very comprehensive Center of Excellence overview and discuss fees and timing after your review.

To learn more about multidisciplinary treatment for chronic pain and coexisting disorders including addiction please check out my article The Need for Multidisciplinary Chronic Pain Management that you can download for free on our Ariticles page.

You can learn more about the Addiction-Free Pain Management® System at our website www.addiction-free.com. If you are working with people in chronic pain and want to learn how to develop a plan for managing their pain and coexisting psychological disorders including depression or addiction effectively please go to our Publications page and check out my book the Managing Pain and Coexisting Disorders: Using the Addiction-Free Pain Management® System. To purchase this book please Click Here.

To listen to a recent radio interview I did conducted by Mary Woods for her program One Hour at a Time please Click Here to go to this interview.

To read the November issue of Chronic Pain Solutions Newsletter please Click here. If you want to sign up for the newsletter, please Click here and input your name and email address. You will then recieve an autoresponse email that you need to reply to in order to finalize enrollment.

To learn about two skill trainings coming up in Sacramento California designed to teach treatment strategies for people living with chronic pain and coexisting disorders including disorders including addiction please Click Here.