Abstract

Chronic pain affects nearly one in every four adults worldwide, with pain one of the most common symptoms resulting in medical consultation. The increasing focus on chronic pain presents difficulties for the busy practitioner. Patients typically describe a complex pattern of discomfort, disability, and distress, with pain affecting physical, social, and psychological functioning. Clinicians must efficiently condense widely varied symptomatic descriptions into characteristic patterns to permit accurate diagnosis and implement effective treatment. This atlas serves as a useful educational resource for the healthcare provider by providing ready access to characteristic descriptions of common pain syndromes, patient photographs and imaging studies, and evidence-based data summaries from the latest research studies, all presented in easy-to-understand visual formats. This volume offers a unique and broad-based perspective on the subject, drawing on the resources and extensive clinical experience of anesthesiology, internal medicine, neurology, oncology, and rheumatology. Pain assessment and management is comprehensively addressed by including common syndromes from most body regions and inclusion of medication, non-medication, and interventional therapy options for both non-malignant and malignant chronic pain. An entire chapter focused on pain management tools for patients provides charting documentation aids and educational patient handouts to facilitate patients' understanding of their individual pain syndrome and a variety of pain management techniques. Extensive use of figures, algorithms, tables, and boxes, along with the patient educational materials, makes this book an invaluable chronic pain reference as well as a practical resource for daily clinical practice.