21st Annual Napa Pain Conference

Chronic pain affects 85 million people in the United States alone and it is now recognized that pain is a sign of illness and can provide a useful tool for Doctors to measure and monitor a patient’s state of health, illness or well-being. Although pain is subjective and can vary from one patient to another and from one day to the next, healthcare providers attempt to measure pain as objectively as possible and treat pain as effectively as possible. It is essential that pain clinicians get a sense of how much pain a patient is experiencing and to determine if treatments are effective or simply not working to combat pain. Because pain is such an important part of diagnosis and treatment, the need for doctors, nurses and other healthcare providers to register pain as a vital sign is becoming a mandated part of medical care.