“Zero pain is not the goal,” Dr. Thomas H. Lee, chief medical officer of the healthcare consulting firm Press Ganey, wrote in a commentary published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Assn. “The reduction of suffering is — and that is something more complex than analgesia alone.”
That view flies in the face of attempts by doctors to suppress their patients’ pain as much as practically possible. These efforts helped fuel a surge in prescriptions for opiate painkillers, such as OxyContin, Percocet and Vicodin.
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