CBC News Saskatchewan
Regina pain clinic using a holistic approach to pain management over prescribing opioids
Regina pain clinic using a holistic approach to pain management over prescribing opioids
so at this time we have a staff which is exclusive to the clinic myself as the only prescriber so far we are working on mentoring and training more physicians and residents then we have addiction counselor registered site nurse and LPN who's working only in the clinic so we've expanded from half-day to two days however we still have lots and lots of resource constraints time constraints on my part and space constraints as you just noticed in the clinic today the message that I would want to say and I've already said is more and more authorities need to recognize if patients have to be treated in the best possible way for chronic pain we need to have more resources when we talk of physiotherapy then the barriers are it costs the patient when we talk of self-management more of mind related therapies like cognitive behavioral therapy counseling they are all going to cost the patient so these are chronic pain patients which constitute about 30% of patients that come to any primary healthcare office these patients when they are advised other therapies they don't have the money or they have other barriers like transportation mobility barriers they can't access those services and yet giving and prescribing a drug is so easy because it's covered so we have to get our priorities right and I think that's the message I want to say if we have to get our patients off for four periods we have to offer them alternative non drug therapies that needs to be covered we have to train more and more of our fraternity that is the medical providers in understanding because I think there is a myth out there that chronic pain is helped by opioids it is not the case and already I see a lot of push towards awareness in this there is now a trend towards decreasing the opioid prescriptions our regulatory authorities are becoming more and more aware and conscious of that there are more conferences more educational activities in which we can participate as providers to understand more about how to manage chronic pain in a rational evidence-based manner rather than prescription of opioids because all of the world is not managing chronic pain like this this is mainly a North America crisis a lot of our authorities are recognizing this and there is a reduction in the duration of opioid prescriptions so typically a doctor now is prescribing for shorter times and that actually promotes more healthy interaction between doctor and patient because a patient is going to come again and again if you are grieving small duration drugs and so and like I said lots of educational opportunities and lots of literature now is coming to us which says how little benefit there is of chronic use of opioids in cans non-cancer pain I'm not talking about cancer pain opioids definitely have a use in cancer pain
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