Last Week I presented at the Annual EAP—MAP Conference. I once again collaborated with Valley Forge Medical Center (VFMC)—our first Addiction-Free Pain Management® Center of Excellence.  This year I presented a workshop titled Are We Managing Pain But Fueling Addiction.  Here is a photo of the VFMC booth where I’m standing with Nancy Kompass, the Clinical Director at Valley Forge.

In June of 2009, Valley Forge Medical Center’s (VFMC) Breakthrough Chronic Pain Management (CPM) Program became the first fully certified Addiction-Free Pain Management® (APM) Center of Excellence (COE) through Dr. Stephen F. Grinstead and the Gorski-CENAPS ® Corp. One of the areas required for APM™ COE programs is to collect pre and post treatment data. Together we have pulled together some interesting outcome data that I also presented to our workshop participants.

There are three areas we highlighted for review: (1) Dr. Grinstead’s Ascending versus Descending pain symptom instrument; (2) The American Academy of Pain Management’s Pain Outcome Profile (POP) instrument; (3) and an example of three of VFMC’s patient pre and post medications. All three areas showed significant improvement. This coming year we will also be comparing data for people how received under four weeks of treatment to data for people who stayed over four weeks and we expect to see a significant difference.

Below I’m posting areas one and two above for your review.

(1) My Ascending versus Descending pain symptom instrument, in which the Ascending symptoms are physical and the Descending symptoms are psychological/emotional:

Number of Physical Symptoms Circled: Highest = 27
Pre-Treatment reported 13.5 symptoms
And Post-Treatment reported 11.6 symptoms
This is a 14.07 % decrease

Physical Symptom Severity Rating: Highest = 90
Pre-Treatment reported 59.4 level of severity
And Post-Treatment reported 46.4 level of severity
This is a 21.89 % decrease

Number of Psychological Symptoms Circled Highest = 27
Pre-Treatment reported 14.5 symptoms
And Post-Treatment reported 12.8 symptoms
This is a 11.72 % decrease

Psychological Symptom Severity Rating Highest = 90
Pre-Treatment reported 64.8 level of severity
And Post-Treatment reported 49.2 level of severity
This is a 24.07 % decrease

(2) The American Academy of Pain Management’s Pain Outcome Profile (POP) instrument five areas from the AAPM’s POP we decided to highlight progress in treatment were:

Reported Level Of…
Mobility increased 17.9%
Activities of daily living increased 17.6%
Vitality increased 15.2%
Fear about pain decreased 20.0%
Negative affect decreased 23.6%

Many of the participants of the conference approached us at the workshop or at the VFMC Sponsor Booth and told us they wished they know about us earlier because they have been attempting to find good programs for this population—people with chronic pain and coexisting disorders including addiction—and weren’t sure where to send them.  Now they know.

We will be highlighting the Valley Forge Medical Center’s Breakthrough Chronic Pain Management Program in our next free Chronic Pain Solutions E-Newsletter. 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.

If you’d like to receive training for helping people with chronic pain and coexisting disorders, including addiction, I’m very excited to announce we are presenting my Addiction-Free Pain Management® Certification Training in Sacramento on August 5-7, 2010. To learn more about this 3 day 20 hour training and my other upcoming trainings you can check out our Calendar page.

You can learn more about the Addiction-Free Pain Management® System at our website www.addiction-free.com. If you or a loved one is undergoing chronic pain management, especially if you’re in recovery or believe you may have a medication or other mental health problem and you want to learn more effective chronic pain management tools, please go to our Publications page and check out my books; especially the Addiction-Free Pain Management® Recovery Guide: Managing Pain and Medication in Recovery. To purchase this book please Click Here.