Disease and treatment-related pain are highly prevalent in patients with advanced illness, making expertise in these clinical domains an integral and high-priority component of palliative care (J Pain Symptom Manage 2014;48:660-77). Anesthesiologists, and especially those with subspecialty training and qualifications in pain medicine, deploy their skills to relieve such suffering routinely in their day-to-day practices but historically have not been well integrated into palliative care teams. This paper will elucidate the importance of that role and exemplify how such integration should become “the new normal” in interdisciplinary, team-based advanced illness management.
Since the majority of palliative care patients are also older individuals, and persistent musculoskeletal and neuropathic pain conditions escalate with aging (Nat Rev Dis Primers 2017;3:17002), pain assessment in this population must take into account not only past pain history and treatment experience, but also concurrent co-morbidties and disease- and treatment-specific (Clin J Pain...
