I flew to Kansas City today to conduct Managing Pain and Coexisting Disorders for ReDiscover and the Shirley Fearon Training Institute.  This training institute is a tribute to the founding director of ReDiscover in 1968 in response to a lack of services for mentally ill persons in South Jackson County Missouri. I am honored to be asked to present at their Fifteenth Annual Shirley Fearon Training Institute as they recognized the importance of delivering education to help providers deliver effective chronic pain management to their patients.

This presentation that is based on the Addiction-Free Pain Management® System  will demonstrate how effective implementation of a multidisciplinary and integrated chronic pain management approach can increase positive treatment outcomes by addressing the synergistic effect of pain and addictive disorder issues. Participants will learn about the three types of components necessary to treat the synergistic symptoms of the Addiction-Pain Syndrome™, which include:

(a) Medication Chronic Pain Management

(b) Emotional/ Psychological Chronic Pain Management

(c) Nonpharmacological Chronic Pain Management

Healthcare and treatment providers are on the front line to accurately assess, intervene upon and develop appropriate treatment plans for the impaired patient undergoing chronic pain management. This can become more difficult when prescription drug abuse/addiction present; often because of a mismanaged chronic pain condition that may be either under treated and over treated.

We know from the research on people using pain medications for chronic pain management that about 1.5 to 20%, depending on the study used, will have substance use disorders (i.e., abuse or addiction). Using a conservative 10% estimate, over 10 million chronic pain sufferers will experience substance use disorders.

Therefore, an important goal of this training will be to focus on identification and effective intervention and treatment of prescription drug abuse for chronic pain management patients. This will be accomplished in part by discussing how to identify the most common red flags of prescription drug abuse, and the denial patterns patients use to avoid recognizing and/or dealing with their prescription drug abuse/addiction, as well as becoming familiar with common pain management drugs of abuse.

Since chronic pain includes both physiological and psychological pain symptoms, the participants of this presentation will learn how to differentiate between the two types of symptoms; how effective implementation of a multidisciplinary and integrated pain management approach can increase positive treatment outcomes by addressing the synergistic effect of pain and chemical dependency issues; and what components are necessary to treat the synergistic symptoms of pain and addiction, which include medication management, emotional/ psychological management, and non-pharmacological pain management.

We have two APM™ Certification Trainings scheduled this Spring—one in Sacramento California on May 18-19 and the one at Valley Forge Medical Center and Hospital on June 10-12. It’s not to late for people to sign up and in fact by mentioning this Blog I will make sure you get a $20 discount for either training. To get this discount you must call Ellen at (916) 575-9961 and ask her for the discount.

To learn more about multidisciplinary treatment for chronic pain management 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 udergoing chronic pain management and want to learn how to develop a plan for managing their chronic pain and coexisting psychological disorders including 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.

For other upcoming trainings you can check out our Calendar page.

To listen to a 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 latest 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.