Abstract

Pain management is a complex issue for all practitioners. Current guidelines can be extremely helpful in categorizing various types of pain syndromes and emphasizing various treatment strategies. However, the more I learn about the differentiation and perception of pain in different patients, the more I realize that treating pain properly is as much art as it is science. As an associate professor of medicine in the department of clinical pharmacology at the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Medicine, it has been my privilege and responsibility to teach the analgesic pharmacology section to medical students in their didactic pharmacology course. I am also responsible for teaching pharmacists and other allied health professionals this same topic on the inpatient wards in the hospital. Although the pharmacology of pure opioid agonists as well as the pharmacology of the mixed opioid agonist/antagonist agents is an extremely important topic for all physicians to understand and utilize, properly comprehending and treating pain also relies quite extensively on proper communication skills. Because pain is generally associated with all types of disease, all physicians, no matter what specialty, understand that analgesic pharmacology is fairly easy to understand but utilizing this knowledge to properly care for patients can be extremely difficult.^1-3