ABSTRACT
Pain, the most common reason that patients seek the care of physicians, is ubiquitous. Recent years have witnessed signicant strides in our knowledge of pain’s basic mechanisms as well as progress in both conventional and alternative therapies (1).Curricula in pain medicine have been developed and disseminated (2), and new standards in pain management have been promulgated, for example, by the Joint Commission on the Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO). And yet, pain-untreated, undertreated, and mistreated remains a problem of signicant scope and complexity. It is a problem, of course, for patients who suffer pain. It is a problem for society as a whole, with annual economic costs estimated at $100 billion by the American Academy for Pain Medicine. And pain is a problem for the profession of medicine, whose very status as a profession is undermined by well-substantiated evidence of physician neglect, indifference, ignorance, and bias toward the problem of pain.
