Stanford Pain Center Receives Center of Excellence Recognition

STANFORD, Calif.--(Business Wire)--
The Stanford Pain Management Center is being honored as one of six
centers of excellence nationwide this year by the American Pain
Society for its successful multidisciplinary approach to relieving the
suffering of patients with chronic pain disorders.

The society announced the recipients of its second annual Clinical
Centers of Excellence in Pain Management Awards on April 10 to
recognize outstanding pain care programs in the United States.

"This is validation for the type of work we've been doing for the
past couple of decades," said Sean Mackey, MD, PhD, chief of the
Division of Pain Management at Stanford Hospital & Clinics and
associate professor of anesthesia at the Stanford University School of
Medicine. "We're seeing the pendulum swing around toward acceptance of
this interdisciplinary type of pain management that involves teams of
medical professionals attacking pain together."

The pain society established the award program in 2006 to
recognize multidisciplinary pain-management programs that offer direct
patient care. This year, 49 applications were judged by a panel of
pain-management experts.

"The award recipients and other centers are proving every day that
integrated, multidisciplinary pain care yields the best long-term
outcomes--medically, psychologically and socially," said Judith Paice,
PhD, pain society president and director of the cancer pain program at
Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.

The award acknowledges a growing movement within the medical
community away from the biomedical model of treating chronic pain as
simply a byproduct of another disorder, Mackey said. Treatment needs
to go beyond the use of surgery and medication alone.

"We're beginning to think of pain as more a disease in its own
right," Mackey said. "Pain fundamentally alters the nervous system. It
affects the individual emotionally, psychologically, and it affects
their family, their friends, their work.

"Pain is the primary reason why patients go to see a doctor,"
Mackey said. "It's the most common reason somebody would be out of
work. It affects people at the most productive time in their lives."

According to national surveys of chronic pain, just under half of
adults have experienced pain in the last two weeks, and nearly four in
10 do so on a regular basis with almost one in five experiencing
chronic pain, Mackey said. This leads to huge health-care expenses
with $100-$200 billion a year spent on pain management.

The Stanford Pain Management Center treats 6,000 patients a year
who are seen by a multidisciplinary team of doctors, psychologists,
physical therapists and occupational therapists.

The pain-management services include novel medications provided
through clinical trials, psychological and behavioral therapies, and
interventional treatments ranging from trigger-point injections to
spinal-cord stimulation.

Stanford also has one of the few academic, inpatient,
comprehensive pain-management programs in the United States, called
the Stanford Comprehensive Interdisciplinary Pain Program. Faculty and
trainees in this program hold multiple National Institute of Health
awards, foundation grants and a dedicated pain research endowment.

Stanford University Medical Center integrates research, medical
education and patient care at its three institutions -- Stanford
University School of Medicine, Stanford Hospital & Clinics and Lucile
Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford. For more information, please
visit the Web site of the medical center's Office of Communication &
Public Affairs at http://mednews.stanford.edu.

Stanford University Medical Center
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