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Chronic Pain Management Accredited Modules for Medical Professionals

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Category: Medical Info and Drug Trials

Published on Saturday, 22 January 2011 16:34

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The recent publication of a free online course for medical professionals to improve their understanding of treating chronic pain in their patients is welcomed.  The course specifically mentions fibromyalgia and although not designed to offer guidance on the full multi-disciplined approach, the fact that neurological pain is explained and treatment guidelines given, means the most prevalent symptom in most cases of fibromyalgia could be tackled successfully.

We would like to publicly thank Grunenthal for sponsoring these sites and all the professionals and organisations that put time and energy into making sure the site covered fibromyalgia.

Beverley Collett, consultant in pain medicine and chair of Chronic Pain Policy Coalition (CPPC), says in the introduction, “unnecessary distress, suffering, anxiety and depression” could be avoided if pain were understood and managed effectively.

The website can be found here: www.change-pain.co.uk and includes:

• CME Series: Chronic Pain Management
  • Module 1 - Assessing pain and physician-patient communication
  • Module 2 - Multimodal management of chronic pain
  • Module 3 - Mechanism-oriented pharmacological management of chronic pain

• Foundation Modules
  • The mechanisms of pain
  • The pharmacology of pain relief

• Specialist Modules
  • Pain and its control (Prof Tony Dickenson)

The different categories of chronic pain are explained and the differences in pharmacological treatments needed for each clearly shown.  If this knowledge is widespread more people now enduring long term pain would have their pain managed and be able to obtain a much improved quality of life.

The down side is that this site is not easy to find by random Googling and I could not find it on the NHS evidence site.  I am not sure if there are links from professional sites but perhaps we could highlight these to the professionals we know that are concerned about tackling the chronic pain of fibromyalgia.