Walking the Tightrope of Chronic Pain Management and Addiction
On Friday April 23rd I was fortunate to present at the Thirteenth Annual Traverse City Area Dual Disorders Task Force Conference in Michigan. The focus of the Traverse Task Force is to present education to assist healthcare professionals to aid clients with co-occurring disorders—one or more existing mental illness problems in addition to a substance use disorder.
This year there were well over 200 healthcare professionals from addiction, mental health, and medical including pain management. The conference focus was on identification of 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 and/or addiction, as well as participants becoming familiar with common pain management drugs of abuse. The training I presented was Walking the Tightrope of Chronic Pain Management and Addiction.
Since chronic pain includes both physiological and psychological pain symptoms, participants also learned 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; and what components are necessary to treat the synergistic symptoms of pain and addiction.
They learned that it requires a specialized treatment plan that includes medication management, emotional and/or psychological symptom management, and non-pharmacological pain management interventions. They also discovered that positive treatment outcomes will be accomplished by managing pain and coexisting disorders utilizing the Addiction-Free Pain Management® synergistic multidisciplinary treatment system.
To learn more about effective chronic pain management using a team approach please check out my article The Need for Multidisciplinary Chronic Pain Management that you can download for free on our Article page.
You can learn about the Addiction-Free Pain Management® System at our website www.addiction-free.com. If you are working with people undergoing chronic pain management and want to learn how to develop a plan for managing their chronic pain and coexisting psychological disorders; including depression, addiction and other coexisting psychological disorders effectively; please consider my book Managing Pain and Coexisting Disorders: Using the Addiction-Free Pain Management® System. To purchase this book please Click Here.
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.
To see an online overview of Cognit delivering Addiction-Free Pain Management® please go to this Link for a free demo.
To learn about my upcoming trainings you can check out our Calendar page.
