Adequate Pain Care Sorely Lacking

One problem is that medical schools give only a "paltry" one hour of training in how to understand and treat pain, said Will Rowe, the executive director of the American Pain Foundation, a national advocacy group that's also based in Baltimore.

As a result, Rowe said, "few physicians are equipped to adequately assess and treat pain."

Nevertheless, "pain has a huge impact on society and the quality of life," said Dr. Larry Driver, the medical director of the Pain Management Center at the University of Texas in Austin. "It costs an estimated $100 billion a year in medical care and lost work."

Despite the prevalence of pain, Driver estimated that the nation has only one pain specialist for every 21,000 suffering patients. "There's not enough pain care to go around," he said.

In addition, only 2 percent of NIH research money goes for pain studies, Rowe said, despite the fact that pain is the "all-time number one cause for people to seek medical attention."

Pain experts distinguish between acute pain, as when you break an arm or hit your thumb with a hammer, and chronic pain, long-lasting suffering from injury or disease.

Acute pain can be beneficial, prodding the victim to avoid painful situations in the future, Georgetown's Heit said. Chronic pain, however, is "pain that has outlived its usefulness."

"If we don't treat acute pain, it moves to chronic pain (by) rewiring the nervous system," Berger warned.

The Pain Foundation says that the most common complaints are: back pain, at 55 million cases; arthritis pain, 43 million; and chronic headaches, 40 million.

The failure to treat pain adequately is the combined fault of doctors, patients, the legal system and the health-care system as a whole, speakers at the seminar said.

In addition to receiving inadequate training in pain management, doctors are often reluctant to treat patients for pain, Rowe said.