Adequate pain care sorely lacking for patients

Medical science has learned a great deal about the causes of pain and ways to relieve it, pain experts say, but for a host of reasons, the treatment of pain and suffering has improved hardly at all in recent years. John Seffrin, the president of the American Cancer Society, calls this "a national health-care crisis of under-treated pain." "Nearly all cancer pain can be relieved, but fewer than half of our patients report adequate pain relief," Rebecca Kirch, the society's associate director of policy, told a pain seminar in Washington last week. Hospitals do a little better than that in managing pain for patients with all kinds of illnesses, according to a survey to be published Thursday in the New England Journal of Medicine.

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