Systematic review of outpatient services for chronic pain control.

Abstract

Individual patient data Published group data Comparisons with placebo Indirect ranking Comparison with other 'active' interventions Direct ranking Phenytoin had no effect in irritable bowel syndrome, and carbamazepine little effect in poststroke pain. Clonazepam was effective in one study of temporomandibular joint dysfunction. Although anticonvulsants are widely used in chronic pain relief, surprisingly few RCTs show analgesic effectiveness. No RCT compared different anticonvulsants. * The following studies are excluded from the tables: Puder (1988), in which the comparison was of immediate versus delayed treatment; Strauss et al (1986), Pilowsky et al (1995), Peters et al (1991), and Cott et al (1992), because the treatments were either insufficiently detailed or too unorthodox to code satisfactorily.