New Developments in Pain Management

Course overview

Pain is a universally understood sign of disease or injury, but it may also be considered a medical condition in its own right. The complexity associated with understanding or assessing pain makes its treatment challenging to the healthcare clinician. These difficulties can be serious when pain treatment gives rise to other health problems, such as medication tolerance or misuse. A newly approved oral drug, Seglentis, may offer an alternative pain management approach that addresses some of the challenges clinicians face when treating pain. Future directions in pain management include new target-directed small-molecule analgesics, gene therapy, ligand-gated ion channels, anti-inflammatory cytokines, pain-modulating neurotransmitters, and image-guided delivery of locoregional pain syndromes.