Pain Management

Pain Management deals with unpleasant experience of patients. The experience may be either real or imagined or both. It may be even a fantasy with no tissue problem at all. Regardless of its origin, pain itself seems very real to patients who naturally seek relief from it. Pain management is a post-modern multidisciplinary approach to the problem, which combines medical, physical and psychiatric treatments.

Organised pain management clinic facilities were first started in the United States after the Second World War. In the 1970s, it emerged in the developed world as a regular discipline in medical sciences and treatment. This branch of medical discipline began to be practiced in Bangladesh from 1993. Dr. Jonaid Shafiq, who got postgraduate qualification on the subject from the Kyushu University, Fukuoka, Japan, first organised Pain Clinic at IPGMR (now Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujib Medical University Hospital) in 1993 in collaboration with Professor KM Iqbal of the Department of Anesthesiology and Professor Quazi Deen Mohammad of Department of Neuromedicine. Department of Anesthesiology organised the comprehensive pain clinic at IPGMR in concert with Neuromedicine, Neurosurgery, Psychiatry and Physical Medicine with only outdoor facilities. With successful performances of outdoor treatment, regular indoor facilities were established in the hospital in 1997.

In private sector, Dr. Jonaid Shafiq first organised the pain clinic in Japan Bangladesh Friendship Hospital in 1994. Now there are several organised pain clinics in the country. The success of pain clinics led the performing clinicians to establish in February 1997 a professional association called Bangladesh Society for Study of Pain (BSSP). To further research and exchanges of experiences and encounters, the BSSP organises every alternate month a scientific seminar on different aspects of the discipline in different medical institutions of Bangladesh. It also organises exchange training programme with different similar organisations of the world, especially of Japan, wherefrom the discipline of pain management came to be practiced first in Bangladesh. [Sarder A Nayeem]