Integrative Pain Medicine

Abstract

In 2001, the Accreditation Council of Graduate Medical Education required residency programs to develop programs on integrative collaboration in patient care, including team-building skills and partnering skills, with other professionals in health care. Residents are required to learn how and when to refer to psychologists; to do this, they must learn from mental health providers how thinking style, memory, and emotions influence health; how social and cultural influences affect health care utilization; and how their interactions with patients can affect compliance. Furthermore, they must learn to integrate this information into their own medicinal discipline. The Accreditation Council of Graduate Medical Education (2007) also requires pain fellowship programs to 'provide educational experience in common psychiatric and pain co-morbidities, which include substance-related, mood, anxiety, somatoform, factitious, and personality disorders' with programs that 'provide educational experience in the effects of pain medications on mental status. The fellow must understand the principles and techniques of the psychosocial therapies, with special attention to supportive and cognitive behavioral therapies, sufficient to explain to a patient and make a referral when indicated. Faculty must be psychiatrists or clinical psychologists who have documented experience in the evaluation and treatment of patients with chronic pain.' To meet this requirement, some programs hire psychologists to practice with and teach fellows about the psychological aspects and management of pain and about how to evaluate it. Training includes daily participation in collaborative conversations about clinic patients, monitoring of a selected group of pain patients with multiple psychosocial and medical problems who are followed by the psychologist, and lectures on the topics discussed in this chapter. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved)