FIRST PERSON ADVOCATE

DISCUSS PAIN MANAGEMENT IN PATIENTS WITH SUBSTANCE ABUSE CONCERNS

In a perfect world, how would you change the way pain care is delivered?

You know what I would do first? I would convene a major summit. The summit would get all the stakeholders together—the regulators, the patients, the doctors and other healthcare providers who are involved in pain management, the insurance companies, the media. I would bring them all together and say, ‘Look, we all have a stake in good pain management being available to people in ways that treat their pain, don't expose them to undue risk, and don't expose society to undue risk.’ I would lock the door and say nobody leaves until we're able to stop coming up with simple-minded solutions to an extremely complicated problem.

So that's what I would do: I would get all of the stakeholders to the table and say, ‘I realize we live in a world of sound-bytes, and everybody wants to sound like they have the answer on TV where they have less than ten seconds to express it, but the truth is this problem defies simple solutions, it really is a complicated problem, and everyone needs to work together.’

Steve Passik, PhD, Associate Attending Psychologist at the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center