International Stakeholder Community of Pain Experts and Leaders Call for an Urgent Action on Forced Opioid Tapering

Abstract

Collaborative on Countering the US Opioid Epidemic [8] has been focusing on comprehensive and collaborative efforts to fundamentally address the opioid epidemic crisis.All of these major initiatives emphasize pain education as a key component in the fight against the dual crises of chronic pain and the opioid epidemic.I am honored to represent the AAPM on the HHS Pain Management Task Force and the NAM Action Collaborative and contribute to these important initiatives of our nation on your behalf.The AAPM emphasizes pain education as a strategic priority in its mission.In the coming years, we will focus on defining competencies and developing educational content for a spectrum of audiences, including patients, the public, and clinicians; further elevating the impact of our journal Pain Medicine; improving the educational programming of our annual meetings as long-standing cornerstones of the AAPM's education efforts; and promoting integration of educational efforts by various stakeholders, including the NIH, HHS, and NAM.We will place special emphasis on pain fellowship education, as today's fellows are tomorrow's leaders.We will also expand our membership to doctoral-level professionals specializing in pain medicine, who will not only contribute to multidisciplinary patient care but also play a key role in our educational and research efforts.We will identify major barriers to effective pain education and explore better and more innovative ways to improve pain education.We will need to define outcome metrics to measure the success or failure of pain education efforts.Pain medicine is a multidisciplinary specialty that has been constantly evolving and expanding in the last few decades and will continue to do so at accelerated rates.Pain education will inevitably evolve in terms of objectives, content, and delivery.But the purpose of pain education, to improve patient care, will never change.