CPM-03 - "I Won't Go Down!" - What To Do When All Else Fails?

Who amongst us, as clinicians, have managed patients with chronic, long-term pain resistant to any and all treatment modalities tried? What do we do in those situations? Refer out to a different pain management group, again? Try the same medication already tried and failed by the patient to see if, by some miracle, it will work? Or, do we just give up and counsel the patient that their pain is too difficult to treat? That there isn’t anything else we can do?

This seminar intends to set up the discussion of how we handle these types of complicated cases when there appears to be no end in sight. We will review assessment strategies to verify what exact modalities have failed in the past, as not all failures are created equally. We will also delineate between ‘last line’ treatment modalities that may be used when all others fail. Some specific treatments of interest include IV lidocaine infusions, last line anticonvulsants, pain pumps, and NMDA antagonists.

This lecture will empower clinicians of all types to do as Rocky; continue fighting and refuse to go down.