On July 16, 2007, the Ministry of Health of China issued an important document “Notice on the Addition of “Pain Medicine” to the List of Medical Institutions’ Medical Subjects” (No. 227 [2007] of the Ministry of Health). The document specifies the addition of the first-level medical subject “pain department” to the “Medical Institution Diagnostic and Treatment Subjects List” (Annex 1 of the document No. 27 [1994]), code: “27”. The main scope of business of “pain department” is: the diagnosis and treatment of chronic pain. Since then, a new independent diagnosis and treatment discipline has been born in China’s clinical medicine. Gao Li, Department of Pain, Affiliated Hospital of Inner Mongolia Medical University
Chronic pain is not only a symptom, but also a disease, including spinal pain, soft tissue pain, neuropathic pain, cancer pain, bone and joint pain, unexplained visceral pain, peripheral neuralgia caused by diabetes, post-herpetic neuralgia, etc. With the continuous improvement of people’s living standard, chronic pain as a common disease and multi-morbidity has been troubling hundreds of millions of patients. According to preliminary estimates, there are more than 300 million chronic pain patients in China, and the number will increase by 10-20 million every year. The negative impact of pain on people is tremendous. It causes various adverse emotions and psychological disorders; leads to dysfunction of various systems, low immune function, and reduces the quality of life of patients; in serious cases, it can cause disability and even threaten life. At the 9th World Pain Conference in 1999, the International Pain Society proposed that “chronic pain is not simply a symptom, but a disease.”
With the rapid development of medicine, pain medicine has formed a relatively complete theory, diagnosis and treatment techniques, as well as central pain, head and facial pain, low back pain, soft tissue pain, cancer pain, pelvic pain, pain nerve block and interventional techniques and other subspecialties, and pain science has become a clinical independent discipline with inevitability. For a long time, pain patients are scattered in many departments such as orthopedics, neurology, neurosurgery, anesthesiology, rehabilitation, oncology, etc. It is difficult to grasp the standardized diagnosis and treatment of chronic pain diseases as a whole, and the result is often “small pains are seen by all departments, but big pains are not managed by anyone”, so many chronic pain patients are not effectively treated. The lack of a pain department has caused problems for pain treatment professionals in terms of work arrangement, title promotion, professional assessment and continuing education, and has seriously affected the construction of the pain professional discipline team, which has become a “bottleneck” hindering the development of pain medicine. The document of the Ministry of Health specifies the establishment of “pain department” as a first-class medical treatment subject in hospitals above the second level nationwide, which will definitely promote the standardized development of pain medicine in China and bring benefits to the majority of patients with chronic pain diseases.
At present, China has established a backbone technical team of more than 90,000 pain specialists, cultivated a number of experts and scholars with profound academic and technical attainments, and initially established three systems of pain medicine: specialized theoretical system, clinical diagnosis and treatment system, and efficacy and rehabilitation evaluation system. With the efforts of the Chinese Pain Branch, nearly 1,000 medical units have set up pain treatment specialties nationwide. The pain branch has also established 1 0 pain diagnosis and treatment clinical centers. The pain department is a clinical department that uses clinical, imaging, testing, neurophysiological and neurobiological methods to diagnose and treat painful diseases with drugs, minimally invasive interventions, medical devices and other invasive or medical technology. The main scope of business is the diagnosis and treatment of chronic pain, providing patients with professional pain treatment services.