Pain and Chemical Dependency

Both pain and addiction are tremendous public health problems. Practitioners of every stripe say that they learned precious little about pain or addiction in their training and readily admit that instruction on the interface of pain and addiction is nonexistent. The recent problem of prescription drug abuse has only served to highlight the fact that these two worlds need unificationthose who treat pain must be informed about the risks of controlled substances and those who treat addiction need to better and more fully understand their benefits. Nowhere is the pooled knowledge of pain management and addiction medicine brought together to allow for a greater appreciation of the risks of addiction when treating people with pain and the pain problems of those with chemical dependency. This major new volume brings this vast knowledge base together, presenting an array of perspectives by the foremost thought leaders at the interface of pain and chemical dependency, and is the most comprehensive resource on the subject to date.

There have been an increasing number of seminars devoted to this topic and a new society, The International Society on Pain and Chemical Dependency, has recently been formed, and this volume is destined to become the classic text on this multidisciplinary subject. It will appeal to anesthesiologists, neurologists, rehab physicians, palliative care staff, pain center physicians, and psychologists.

Howard Smithe is Academic Director of Pain Management and Associate Professor of Anesthesiology at the Albany Medical College in New York. Steven Passik is an Associate Professor of Medicine and Behavioral Science, Associate Professor of Pshychology in Psychiatry Weill Medical College of Cornell, University Associate Attending Pshychologist Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Schiences Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center at the University of Kentucky.