Dealing with pain

» Re: “Summit calls for new pain strategy” (Gazette, April 25).

As a retired physician, I am sorry to say that Sharon Kirkey’s article describing the inadequacies of Canada’s health-care system in dealing with the serious issue of pain is accurate.

My formal medical education at Mcgill (1981-85) did include a few complex lectures on the physiological basis of pain, but the teaching about the practical aspects of actual pain management and control was minimal and incidental.

This is strange and a little difficult to understand when you consider that virtually all doctors end up having to deal with pain suffered by their patients sooner or later.

Years of medical practice have taught me that the experience of pain is an incredibly complex subject that is still incompletely understood; this, in part, makes it very difficult to come up with effective pain-management strategies for all patients. Personal moral valuations as to the “legitimacy” of the pain experienced by some patients often creep in to further cloud the issue.

The only moral position to take when dealing with pain is that everybody’s pain is legitimate and real and must be addressed as such.

It is time for all medical faculties the world over to include substantial, standardized courses on the challenging issue of pain and pain management.

Lesson No. 1 in every course must be: The “onesize-fits-all” approach to treating pain is not only wrong, it is unethical.

Laszlo Bagu

Côte St. Luc