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Dealing with temporary pain and discomfort is the common denominator in molding today’s armed forces.
When a new recruit signs on the dotted line, they are more than aware of the mental and physical pain that awaits them at boot camp. Pain at boot camp is
perhaps the most common, intangible tool wielded by training instructors.
But according to the Army’s Pain Management Task Force, pain is also the enemy.
The National Pain Foundation estimates 76 million Americans are living with pain, which costs the U.S. an estimated $100 billion annually in areas such as decreased productivity related to lost work days. And the military is not immune.
In August 2009, Army Surgeon General Lt. Gen. Eric Schoomaker established the Army Pain Management Task Force, which was charged with making recommendations for a comprehensive pain management strategy for the Army Medical Department.
The task force was composed of nominated members from throughout each military service and the Veterans Health Administration and involved multiple site visits, subject matter expert interviews, and medical policy and literature reviews.
According to its May 2010 final report, the goal of the task force was to develop a strategy that is “holistic, multidisciplinary and multimodal in its approach, utilizes state of the art science modalities and technologies, and provides optimal quality of life for Soldiers and other patients with acute and chronic pain.”
The report laid out 109 recommendations for improving pain management across the Department of Defense and stated that, “Pain medicine should be managed by integrated care teams, which employ a biopsychosocial model of care.”
The biopsychosocial model assumes that biological, psychological and social factors all play a significant role in human functioning in the context of disease or illness.
The report also stated that even though the Department of Defense has a strong group of pain medicine sub specialists, the amount of specialists compared to the mission is too few. Fortunately, at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, one such specialist did not let the shortage of pain medicine physicians stop him from building a comprehensive pain program.
“The Army’s going to be ahead of the world when it comes to pain medicine once the recommendations are instituted,” said Dr. (Maj.) Ronald White, LRMC director of pain management and the Europe Regional Medical Command pain consultant.
Dr. White pointed out the Army’s plan for an integrated team composed of pain medicine specialists, psychiatrists, chiropractors, physical therapists, occupational therapists, acupuncturists, massage therapists, nurse educators and nurse case managers is state-of-the-art when compared to the civilian sector.
The LRMC Pain Clinic was already heading in the right direction as the task force got underway. By the time the recommendations were released in May 2010, Dr. White said LRMC met a majority of the task force’s recommendations. But the change didn’t happen overnight.
It began more than two years ago when Dr. White, a board-certified anesthesiologist and pain medicine specialist, began a needs analysis and business analysis to assess the need, diagnosis and treatment of pain at LRMC. His findings revealed a need for seven pain medicine specialists in ERMC in order to diagnose and treat the pain needs of all active-duty service members in Europe (U.S. European Command), Africa (U.S. Africa Command) and Western Asia (U.S. Central Command).
The next step was to invest in the people and equipment to meet that demand. The payback, Dr. White said, is huge because proper pain treatment can help keep a Soldier on active duty who otherwise might be medically discharged in instances where necessary pain medication, such as Percocet, isn’t compatible with performing one’s duties.
“But there are other things you can do. You can kill pain. There are a lot of things you can do to keep people on active duty,” Dr. White said. At LRMC, the list of alternatives includes ancient forms of traditional acupuncture to a more recent technique involving earring-like studs in the ear lobe, and hi-tech approaches such as spinal cord stimulation.
No one has to convince Col. Robert Choppa on the value of taking a new look at traditional methods of treating pain.
The 28-year Army veteran battled chronic pain for 20 years after he fractured multiple spinal vertebrae in a parachute incident. He endured three spine fusions before visiting Dr. White’s team for a spinal cord stimulator. A spinal cord stimulator is a device used to exert pulsed electrical signals to the spinal cord to control chronic pain.
“Literally, the spinal stimulator allowed me to get through another combat tour,” Colonel Choppa said. “It’s made a 100 percent difference in my quality of life. Life changing, absolutely life changing is the best way to describe it.”
Colonel Choppa spoke to the pain task force when it was in Iraq for a visit. He highlighted the advantages he witnessed, which include a decrease in the amount of required pain medications and the ability to retain the “Army’s best and brightest” instead of an early discharge due to pain. The colonel said he would have been medically evacuated with unbearable pain from Iraq had it not been for the spinal stimulator.
Dr. White said pain can be arbitrarily broken down into acute pain, chronic pain and cancer pain. The LRMC Pain Clinic focuses on all three and currently sees all acute pain patients admitted as inpatients and all active duty with pain needs serving in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Of chronic pain patients, the clinic is currently able to treat 10 percent of active-duty patients and 1 percent of dependents and retirees.
Once the entire LRMC Pain Clinic team is in place, the clinic will capture 100 percent of active-duty service members suffering from chronic pain and has a goal of treating 50 percent of family members and retirees who are seen on a space
available basis. No matter the type of pain, the clinic’s focus is on the individual patient and their needs.
“Our goal is function, not just reducing pain,” Dr. White said. “It is to increase people’s function, whatever that might be. So if they’re a cancer patient, we want them to be cognitively aware and able to interact with their family. If they have back pain and can’t sleep, we want them to sleep first, then we want them to be able to do their therapy, then we want them to do their work, then we want them to be able to do their PT test. It is a goal-oriented function process that we focus on.”
The benefits of the clinic and its multimodalities go beyond just pain treatment, but aid in a more specific diagnosis. Through the use of image-guided treatment, Dr. White and his team can help locate the primary source for pain. Dr White gives the example of the complaint of back pain, which can have a multitude of possible causes. Using image-guided treatments, he can localize the pain and tighten the diagnosis.
“We do focused diagnostics for the spine surgeons,” Dr. White said. “If they want to cut something out, we can go in there and say this is the one joint or disc that is the primary pain generator.”
Dr. White also notes that controlling pain helps the whole medical team. Using other tools available in the clinic to control pain can help Traumatic Brain Injury patients reduce their medications, thus reducing the detriment of poly-pharmacy on an injured brain, and further enhancing the benefits of other disciplines.
“So a lot of our energy is focused on preventing people from being boarded and prevent all the negative consequences of pain — the divorce rate, the suicide rate, the accidental drug overdose death rate,” Dr. White said.
Aeschylus, an ancient Greek tragedian, once said, “Who, except the gods, can live time through forever without any pain?”
The Army doesn’t expect Soldiers to avoid pain all together, but it is certainly putting up a fight.
