Multidisciplinary pain center follow-up study: Evaluation with a no-treatment control group

Abstract

The long-term efficacy of a multidisciplinary pain management center was evaluated by comparing 20 treated patients with 20 no-treatment control patients who met the program's entrance criteria, wanted to participate, but could not because they did not have insurance coverage. At 1-5 years follow-up, 60% of the treated patients met all of the criteria for success established by Roberts and Reinhardt, while none of the untreated patients did so. Treated patients reported less interference with activities, more uptime, lower pain levels, less depression, and fewer hospitalizations than untreated patients. Also, more treated patients reported being employed, while fewer used either narcotic or psychotropic medications at follow-up compared to untreated patients. Pretreatment-to-follow-up changes are reported for both the treated and untreated groups.

Medication quantification scores and evaluation of patient pharmacology profiles

“…The consistency of results obtained in prior studies using 1992 detriment weights and the present study using the 1998 detriment weights suggests that the MQS can also accommodate changes that may occur with greater knowledge about adverse effects of current medications or classes of medications that may be introduced in the future. Unlike some prior attempts to quantify medication use, in which drug use was often indicated simply by the presence or absence of broad classes of medication (eg, narcotics, psychotropics) [2,8,9], the MQS allows the inclusion of all pain-related medications grouped according to their potential for adverse effects. Thus, any patterns in detrimental medication use are more likely to be reliably detected, even with changes in detriment weights, due to the greater range of potential values assigned to each pharmacologic class.…”

“…T he multidisciplinary pain management approach has been empirically validated as an effective intervention for chronic pain sufferers [1][2][3][4]. Due to the multifaceted nature of chronic pain, multiple criteria are often used to determine the success of these programs.…”

“…Prior studies have examined medication reduction using a variety of assessment methods [1,2,4,[6][7][8][9][10]. For example, some studies assessed the frequency or percentage of certain pharmacologic classes of substances taken by each patient [4,7], and others attempted to include medication dose [1,6].…”

Integrated, Team-Based Chronic Pain Management: Bridges from Theory and Research to High Quality Patient Care

“…The latter were not superior to usual care. In an effort to determine whether the costs associated with multidisciplinary interventions were justifi ed in the long term, several other investigations have examined outcomes ranging from 18 months to 10 years (Cassisi et al 1989 ;Bendix et al 1998 ;Guck et al 1985 ;Meilman et al 1985 ). These studies demonstrate sustained improvements in a variety of domains, including pain intensity, and disability as well as activity level, and participation in social interactions.…”

Das Göttinger Rücken Intensiv Programm (GRIP) Ein multimodales Behandlungsprogramm für Patienten mit chronischen Rückenschmerzen, Teil 4 * ,

“…Aus den bisher in der Literatur angeführten Studien zur Effektivität von multimodalen Behandlungsprogrammen geht hervor, daß Lebensalter und Bildungsstand der Patienten [13,26,32], die Anzahl der Voroperationen [27], Krankengeld-und Rentenzahlungen [8], die Dauer der vorherigen Arbeitsunfähigkeit bzw. des Chronifizierungsgrades [1,3,7,16,22,48] sowie möglicherweise die spezifische Art der Krankheitsbewältigung [30,44,49,53,58] bzw.…”