Pain: How to Teach About It

Looks like Johns Hopkins jumped on the pain train. They decided that they needed to expand their teachings on the subject and get a nice NPR piece about it. The authors got to interview some medical students:

She wasn’t the only one aware of how fraught pain can be right now. Student Jenny Franke says she has been shadowing doctors in a clinic and has seen new patients come in with pain.

“And it seems that the therapy that they are on hasn’t been working, and a lot of the time, their past primary care providers just keep prescribing the same thing over and over,” Franke says. “Sometimes those patients will ask for opioids, and then it turns into kind of an awkward conversation.”

Those darn primary care providers. The narrative in this whole opioid crisis has been to blame the doctors. I hate that. Forget the pill mills that accounted for most of this. Forget the diverting patients who worked the system.

So is this course going to teach students to to treat pain like the 5th vital sign or are they going to restrict opioids like it is never to be used? You can read the whole piece and they basically run the whole gamut of not demonizing narcs, that they are just a tool in the toolbox routine, and on and on.

I bet this course is pretty good but these students aren’t in the real world and won’t be for years so what good will 4 days of a course do? By the time they are in the real word something else will be problematic. Hey where is the course on vaping?

Lastly, I would be remiss not to add this:

Brennan:
I smoked pot with Johnny Hopkins.

Nancy:
You don’t know anyone named Johnny Hopkins.

Brennan:
It was Johnny Hopkins and Sloan Kettering. And they were blazing that shit up every day.

Join 5,568 other subscribers