Interventions in Pain Management

Abstract

Since the inception of pain management, the clinical practice of pain medicine has gone through many changes over the course of nearly seven decades. John J Bonica, the father and pioneer of pain management published first comprehensive edition of the Bonica’s Management of Pain sixty five years ago. It started by anaesthesiologists as a concept of basic understanding of the mechanisms of pain and to treat pain, which has now evolved into a cutting-edge medical specialty with dedicated full-fledged fellowship training of physicians from many medical specialties. The blindly performed nerve blocks are now performed under various guidance techniques. The advent of fluoroscopy has made spinal injections precise, safer and effective. We can now offer pain management to any part of the world with hi-tech ultrasonography-guided procedures to provide relief of wide variety of pain conditions including neuropathic pain, pain due to cancer, and acute pain situations for adults as well as children with substantially updated scientific advancements and contemporary therapies that have emerged over the past decade. Now, the practice of pain medicine addresses not only comprehensive evaluation of the pain patients, pain conditions, and methods for symptomatic control involving multimodality and multidisciplinary pain treatment, but also cost-effectiveness and equal access without economic, political, legal, ethical, or sociological biases.