The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, and now a documentary from Ken Burns on PBS, The Emperor of All Maladies is a magnificent, profoundly humane “biography” of cancer—from its first documented appearances thousands of years ago through the epic battles in the twentieth century to cure, control, and conquer it to a radical new understanding of More Info »
Maximizing Safety with Methadone & Other Opioids
Opioids provide life-saving analgesia for the millions of Americans who suffer with chronic pain, yet overdose deaths are rising at an alarming rate, with methadone implicated to a disproportionate degree [Paulozzi et al. 2006; Webster 2005; Warner et al. 2009]. Methadone deaths increased almost seven-fold from 790 in 1999 to 5,420 in 2006, rising faster More Info »
Avoiding Opioid Abuse While Managing Pain: A Guide for Practitioners
A much-needed and long overdue guide for clinicians who prescribe opioids, sorting out the clinical, regulatory, and ethical issues associated with the prescribing of opioid analgesics.
Pain: the Science of Suffering
Pain is one of medicine’s greatest mysteries. When farmer John Mitson caught his hand in a baler, he cut off his trapped hand and carried it to a neighbor. “Sheer survival and logic” was how he described it. “And strangely, I didn’t feel any pain.” How can this be? We’re taught that pain is a More Info »
Oral Methadone Dosing for Chronic Pain: A Practitioner’s Guide
Methadone has emerged as a good choice for the management of cancer pain and chronic non-cancer pain both as a first-line medication and as a replacement opioid. Particular cautions must be observed as methadone’s pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics are unique among opioids. Milligram for milligram, however, methadone is much more powerful than morphine, although there is More Info »
Commonsense Opioid-Risk Management in Chronic Noncancer Pain: A Clinician’s Perspective
Chronic noncancer pain (CNP) is a serious and likely undertreated public health problem. In a 2005 survey, 19% of US adults reported chronic pain and 34% reported recurrent pain [Kuehn 2007]. The annual costs of pain-related healthcare, litigation, and compensation are estimated at $100 billion in the United States alone [Sinatra 2006]. While opioids have More Info »
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 More Info »
Pain Assessment and Pharmacologic Management
Pain Assessment and Pharmacologic Management, by highly renowned authors Chris Pasero and Margo McCaffery, is destined to become the definitive resource in pain management in adults. It provides numerous reproducible tables, boxes, and figures that can be used in clinical practice, and emphasizes the benefits of a multimodal analgesic approach throughout. In addition, Patient Medication More Info »
Handbook of Pain and Palliative Care: Biobehavioral Approaches for the Life Course
This book takes both a biobehavioral and a lifespan approach to understanding long-term and chronic pain, and intervening to optimize patients’ functioning. Rich in clinical diversity, chapters explore emerging areas of interest (computer-based interventions, fibromyalgia, stress), ongoing concerns (cancer pain, low back pain), and special populations (pediatric, elderly, military). This coverage provides readers with a More Info »
Wall and Melzack’s Textbook of Pain
Apply the latest scientific and clinical advances with Wall & Melzack’s Textbook of Pain, 6th Edition. Drs. Stephen McMahon, Martin Koltzenburg, Irene Tracey, and Dennis C. Turk, along with more than 125 other leading authorities, present all of the latest knowledge about the genetics, neurophysiology, psychology, and assessment of every type of pain syndrome. They More Info »