Editor's Corner
Less Pain More Gain
By Yuan-Chi Lin, MD, MPH, FAAP; Francis Kraemer, MD; Meredith R. Brooks, MD, MPH
Welcome to the fall issue of the SPPM Newsletter! We can’t wait to share this new selection of informative articles, reviews, research, and upcoming events. As always, we thank Drs. Anjana Kundu and Rita Agarwal for their outstanding leadership, tireless efforts, and contributions since establishing this newsletter in 2014. The newsletter brings updates of current developments in SPPM, promotes membership benefits, helps to improve patient care, provides pediatric pain medicine education, and advances pediatric pain related research. As we have excitedly observed over the past few years, SPPM membership has expanded and continues to grow. We now have 668 members in our SPPM family! We appreciate the opportunity to serve as the editors for the SPPM Newsletter because we can connect with all of you and other clinicians interested in pediatric pain medicine.
Helping pediatric patients reduce pain and suffering is more complex than just offering analgesia. Clinicians address pain associated with illnesses, as well as pain treatment-related side effects. Furthermore, pain service providers understand that reaching a “zero pain” state is not always achievable or even desirable. Although it is crucial to minimize patients’ pain and suffering, in some cases, it is necessary to make tradeoffs to maximize patients' productivity and quality of life rather than focusing on eliminating their pain. Physicians try to achieve “less pain and more gain” - an idea that acknowledges the “gains” of reducing pain for both patients, their family and providers as well as the focus on functional restoration which is an important area that may lead to holistic “gains” in all areas of a pediatric patient’s life.
The use of opioids is associated with serious hazards including opioid use disorders and overdose. With the support of AAP Section on Anesthesiology & Pain Medicine as well as SPPM, Dr. Robert Wilder and Nisha Kandiah have developed a new course “Chronic Pain and the Opioid Crisis.” SPPM members can experience this wonderful educational opportunity through PediaLink.
The Society for Pediatric Pain Medicine’s 5th Annual Meeting will be held on March 22, 2018 at JW Marriott Desert Ridge in Phoenix, Arizona. This is going to be another exciting SPPM conference. This event will focus on new challenges in pediatric pain management that we are all facing in our practices in pediatric pain medicine. Dr. Scott Dingeman provides a nice overview of the upcoming meeting in this issue of SPPM Newsletter.
The 11th International Symposium on Pediatric Pain (ISPP) was held in early July in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The ISPP is sponsored by the Pain in Childhood Special Interest Group of the International Association for the Study of Pain. Dr. Neil Schechter kindly provided us with a review of this important international pediatric pain meeting.
The Annual Meeting of the American Society of Anesthesiologists was held in Boston last month. There were numerous exciting pediatric pain research paper presentations. In this newsletter, we are fortunate to have the presenting authors’ summaries of their important research work.
In addition, in the newsletter, Dr. Charlotte Walter and Vidya Chidambaran provide us with an excellent journal review, providing us with new understandings in the functional development of neural pathways that trigger changes of human pain behavior and neonatal pain, and the long term neurodevelopmental effects of pain experienced in the neonatal period.
We would love to have our members’ contributions and communication for the SPPM Newsletter. Please feel free to reach out to us with any questions, thoughts, suggestions, or comments.
If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to contact:
Yuan-Chi Lin, MD, MPH, FAAP[email protected]
