Practical Management of Pain

Product Description

PRACTICAL MANAGEMENT OF PAIN presents a comprehensive approach to chronic pain with its practical, concise descriptions of pain evaluation, pain syndromes, rationales for management, and treatment modalities. The book includes commonly seen pain syndromes, including headaches, trunk pain, orofacial pain, back pain, and extremity pain, as well as specific pain syndromes such as postoperative pain, pain due to cancer, phantom pain, and pain in the management of AIDS patients. This book is excellent both for non-specialists who treat the occasional pain patient and for physicians specializing in pain management.

Spanish version also available, ISBN: 84-8174-552-9
Product Details

* Amazon Sales Rank: #1074941 in Books
* Published on: 2000-06-15
* Original language: English
* Number of items: 1
* Binding: Hardcover
* 1070 pages

Editorial Reviews

Book Info
Texas Tech Univ., Lubbock, TX. Provides the required theoretical knowledge base for achieving a successful professional career in pain medicine and for preparing the physician trainee for certification in pain medicine. Revised and updated, this edition also covers pain management in outer space. Previous edition: c1992. DNLM: Pain--therapy.

About the Author
P. Prithvi Raj, MD, Professor of Anesthesiology, Co-Director of Pain Services, Texas Tech University Health Science Center School of Medicine, Lubbock, Texas
Customer Reviews

Good Book!5
"Comprehensive' and "Practical" are the proper words to describe this book.

In contrast to other pain medicine text books, it starts with "General Considerations" in Part I which provides very important and hard to find information such as "Organization of Inpatient Pain Service", "Organization of Pain Services for Chronic and Cancer Pain', "Organization of Pain Management Services in Children" which are instrumental for any pain practices in learning and following appropriate guidelines in establishing and providing such services.

In Part II, the "Basic Consideration" touches on Pain Pathways & Mechanisms, Anatomy and Physiology, Neurochemistry in a rather focused way. Two short Chapters with one on "Pharmacological Management of Pain", one on "Biopsychosocial Evaluation & Treatment of Chronic Pain" are refreshing and informative.

In Part III, the "Clinical Consideration", provides Chapters on "Acute Pain Syndromes", "Pain During Pregnancy", "Phantom Pain", "Visceral Pain", "Cancer Pain", "Pain in Selected Neurological Disorders", "Geriatric Pain", "Pain in Children". I find these chapters helpful in setting up guidelines for the management of acute pain, cancer pain, pediatric pain and pain in pregnant women. E.g, I had tough time during my Pain Management Fellowship training in finding the topic of "pain management in pregnancy" from other pain management text books. The discussion on post op pain management is quite thorough which helped me quite a bit during my Pain Fellowship Acute Pain Service.

In Part IV, the section of "Evaluation & Investigation" includes chapters on taking history, performing basic exams including focused neurological and musculoskletal exams which are practical and useful. However, the "Radiology" chapter needs more spine images since spinal pain from neck to low back is what we see most from chronic pain population. I was surprised to find that it does not have a cervical MRI in this chapter. The chapter on `Differential Neural Blockade" is informative, although the clinical utility of these blocks in clinical practice is questionable.

Part V consists of three sections, A, B, C respectively.

Section A includes chapters on "Pharmacological Techniques", "Pharmacokinetics of Analgesics" and "Neuropsychiatric Drug use in Pain Management" which are well written. Among them, the discussion on opioid analgesics is very useful in clinical practice, especially in the settings of management of acute pain, based on my own personal experience.

Section B contains chapters on procedural approaches of commonly performed interventional procedures including from head to toe peripheral nerve blocks, epidural nerve blocks and sympathetic nerve blocks. Additionally, it has a chapter on "Organization of Nerve Block Facility" that contains instrumental information on personnel, equipment, supplies, documentations, which is extremely useful for newly established pain clinic that plans to provide interventional services.

Section C, the "Special Techniques" that covers varieties of individual interventional arena such as "Epidural Steroid Injection", "Facet Sydromes and Block", "Spinal Opioid for Acute Pain", "Cryoneurolysis & Radiofrequency Lesioning", "Spinal Cord Stimulation" , "Implanted Drug Delivery Systems" , "Surgical Techniques in Pain Management", "Alternative Pain Medicine" and even "Acupuncture", etc. The chapter on "Spinal Opioid for Acute Pain" helped me tremendously during my Fellowship training while on Acute Pain Services at Univ. of Michigan Health System, managing patients on patient-controlled epidural opioid infusion for post-op pain control. Some of the chapters, e.g., the "Epidural Steroid Injection" can be significantly improved with inclusion of more fluoroscopic picture demonstrating anatomic locations of needle placement, contrast spread pattern, etc. The Chapter on "Radiofrequency Lesioning" needs more illustration with pictures showing needle placement as one can not learn these procedures from reading procedural descriptions. Good quality fluoroscopic pictures work way better than words.

Part VI through Part VIII summarizes outcomes, efficacy and complications of pain management in acute pain, chronic pain, neuropathic pain and cancer pain. It also includes discussion of pain management in emergency room, home care and palliative medicine. Finally, it ends with discussion of pain management of future.

In summary, this is a comprehensive, practical text book of pain management. It is an excellent resource for physicians to gain insight into areas pertinent to pain management practice, such as how to set up pain clinic, how to organize acute pain service, how to organize a procedural facility, etc. I personally benefited from reading it in preparing my Board Examination in the American Board of Interventional Pain Physicians(Part II)(Fellow, Interventional Pain Practice, World Institute of Pain).

A must for the pain specialist5
This book is in its third edition. The book is keeping up with the rapidly changing specialty of the Practice of Pain. The current edition has been expanded and extensively revised. The approach is "practical". A must for the practicing Pain Specialist and helpful for the pain patient to understand the diagnostic and therapeutic procedures which are well illustrated.

A good first text on Pain Management...4
This is a very good textbook on invasive pain management techniques, and their utility in clinical practice. The book reads well, is reasonably well illustrated, and includes tables of studies of techniques and their success rates. Additional discussion of the non-invasive medical and physiotherapeutic techniques of pain control for specific disorders are included. The book is multi-authored, with sections by Dr. P. Prithvi Raj, a noted expert in the field. This was the first textbook of Pain Management I purchased for my own clinical practice and it served me well. A new edition is due for 1999. I also would recommend the superb and scholarly Monograph, "Current Review of Pain" edited by the same author. This latter series summarizes the latest developments in the basic sciences and the clinical sciences in Pain Management, is very well illustrated, and the author has gone to the trouble of including an annotated bibliography of the voluminous medical and scientific literature on Pain, enabling the researcher and practitioner to select those articles from Medline most useful to his or her research and/or clinical endeavors.