Up until recently I had no idea what pain management entailed and I had no interest in taking care of patients who were in chronic pain, but I recently discovered the wide scope of pain management. I still have a few questions though.
Do interventional pain management docs actually place spinal pumps in or are these only placed by neurosurgeons?
Do they place nerve stimulators or is that also the neurosurgeons?
What territory is pain management's and what is neurosurg's?
Univ of Washington Anesthesia Pain does not do stims, it is all done by the neurosurgeons. Actually i think the guy at U. of W (neurosurgeon) was the one that STARTED stims. This is probably true at other institutions (neurosugeons implanting), however, most anesthsia pain docs do them.
Although you can find pain trained docs doing anesthesia, most pain trained docs (and I have spoken to many since I interviewed at many programs for pain) loved anesthesia and wanted to do both after fininshing their training. (In fact, I had two or three program directors tell me that they were looking for people that were not "running" from anesthesia but enjoyed both). But the point is, most of them ended up doing just pain because they loved it so much.
Obviously some people could not stand it, but the same is true with peds anesthesia, OB anesthesia, etc.
Plus, one of the problems is that each pain clinic is run so very different, so it is hard to judge what being a pain physician is really like based on one clinic. Some pain clinics do very little procedures and a lot of medical management and hand holding. Some do only procedures and minimal to no medical management. I guess it depends on what you like and are comfortable with.
When UrgeWX says that most of the time is spent writing scripts, talking, etc, that is because some clinics are like this. All I can say is too bad for those suckers.
