CME Outfitters Launches New Activities Featuring Expert Faculty on Understanding the Big Picture of Pain
BETHESDA, Md., March 5, 2019 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- CME Outfitters (CMEO), a leading accredited provider of continuing medical education, is excited to announce the launch of two new CME Snacks, Understanding the Big Picture of Pain and Pain Assessment, and Providing the Right Expectations: Understanding the Pathophysiology of Pain, featuring expert faculty members Mark S. Gold, MD, and Steven P. Stanos, DO. These 15-minute online activities are part of a CME Outfitters and USF Health nationwide educational initiative to combat inappropriate use of opioids in the management of acute and chronic pain. The project, Addressing the Opioid Epidemic: A Call to Action to Save Our Communities, is supported by an educational grant from Johnson & Johnson.
The number of opioid related deaths in the US is on the rise and health care providers (HCPs) often struggle finding a balance between prescribing guidelines and the individual needs of patients with acute and/or chronic pain. It's imperative that clinicians seeing patients with pain are knowledgeable about acute and chronic pain pathways and underlying mechanisms so that they align the type of pain--neuropathic, nociceptive, or nociplastic--to their treatment decisions. When evaluating pain, clinicians must look beyond verbal and visual scales that reveal a pain score, and measure possible underlying comorbid anxiety and depression to get a full picture of the impact of pain on patients' functionality and quality of life.
Dr. Steven Stanos discusses the importance of providing the right expectations for patients when developing a treatment plan for chronic pain, "You have to set the right expectation for the patient. If the patient has a poor understanding of their pain condition, there is this thought that is not accurate - that we can give a medicine for everything. There is rarely a medicine or analgesic that is going to drastically decrease or eliminate their pain completely. It's important to tie the pain score to functional outcomes - what is the pain keeping them from doing? This will shape a realistic pain management plan."
In the first CME Snack, Understanding the Big Picture of Pain and Pain Assessment, Dr. Gold and Dr. Stanos highlight the importance of helping patients function better so that they can return to a normal day-to-day life and discuss pain assessment tools and risk stratification so clinicians can both augment top-down inhibition of pain and reduce catastrophic reactions in patients with chronic pain. For more information about this activity or to participate for free, click here.
The second CME Snack, Providing the Right Expectations: Understanding the Pathophysiology of Pain, features Dr. Gold and Dr. Stanos focusing on the pathophysiology of pain and the underlying mechanisms to assessment and appropriate management and share insights on ways to properly educate patients about their pain to optimize safe and effective multimodal treatment plans. To learn more or to participate for free, click here.
To learn more about CME Outfitters & USF Health's initiative, Addressing the Opioid Epidemic: A Call to Action to Save Our Communities, click here.
For a complete list of upcoming and available activities from CME Outfitters, visit http://www.cmeoutfitters.com.
About CME Outfitters, LLC
CME Outfitters develops and distributes live, recorded and web-based, outcomes- and evidence-based educational activities to thousands of clinicians each year and offers expert accreditation and outcome services for non-accredited organizations. CME Outfitters focuses on delivering education to specialty audiences, with strong expertise in neuroscience, inflammatory, infectious, and autoimmune diseases, and cardiovascular disease. For a complete list of certified activities and more information, visit http://www.cmeoutfitters.com or call 877.CME.PROS (877.263.7767).
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