Chronic Pain Management – The Future of Anesthesia

00:00 Chronic Pain Management is also an area of basically an explosion. The need is so vast that it will be almost impossible to train enough physicians to actually take on the load. The leaders of this process are anesthesiologists. For the last 10 to 15 years, anesthesiologists in most western countries have worked very hard to develop chronic pain management as a subspecialty.

00:28 This is modeled after the Australian model. The Australians are decades ahead of most of us in their management of chronic pain, thanks largely to Dr. Michael Cousins, excuse me, Professor Michael Cousins, who is a world leader in developing chronic pain management programs across Australia. And now we try to copy him. In our other countries we're way behind, but we're working to get there. And the impact on chronic pain management and the population is hard to overemphasize. We're going to release patients from a prison that they can't deal with. Get them back into society, get them back communicating with other people, ambulating, getting out into the world, and in some cases learning to live with pain and just getting on with things. This is a huge challenge. It's very exciting and I'm really happy that we've managed to get to this point, and I look forward to the future of improved development in this area.