Patients are often taking pain medications prescribed by their GP or medical team in addition to your treatment and rehab. Patients may not clearly understand their medications, are worried and reluctant to take them, and not stick to their medical plan. You know how hard it is to know if your rehab program is working if patients don’t perform exercises. Similarly, if patients don’t stick to their medical management, your patients and their medical team won’t get clear results from their medications.
We often get to spend more time with our patients than their GP, medical team or specialists, which places us in the unique position to advocate for patients. We can help patients commit and adhere to their medical management, get the best results from it, and help doctors know if it worked or not and make good medical decisions.
Medical treatment may also be causing more side effects than positive effects. With a clear understanding of different medications, you can pick up side effects patients are experiencing and feed this info back to the medical team.
It can be overwhelming trying to remember all the different types of medications, and time-consuming to find out the latest info on pain medications your patients are taking.
Now available - 17. “The drugs don’t work. Or do they?” Part 1 with Nick Kendrick
Clinical Edge’s presentations “The drugs don’t work. Or do they?” with Nick Kendrick will simplify medical management of pain and make it easy for you to access the latest info on pain medications, so you can:
- Help patients clearly understand their medical treatment options.
- Easily identify patients experiencing drug side-effects.
- Confidently feed back the positive effects and side effects of patients are experiencing from pain medications to their medical team.
- Know when to refer patients for medications or injections to help patients fully recover from pain.
In part one of this four part series “The drugs don’t work. Or do they?”, Nick Kendrick will reveal:
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How to help patients decide which medical management option suits them best.
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Help patients understand their medical treatment with a simple acronym.
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Easily understand the different ways medications are administered, and why patients may have a specific method of administration, including:
- Enteral
- Buccal and sublingual
- Per rectum
- Parenteral - injections including intramuscular, subcutaneous, intravenous, intradermal.
- Intraspinal injections - Intrathecal vs epidural
- Topical administration
- Inhaled
- Transdermal - Ionophoresis and phonophoresis
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How to use “Numbers needed to treat” (NNT) and “Numbers needed to harm” (NNH) to help patients understand medication benefits and risks.
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Not familiar with a patient's medication? Discover a simple two step (and FREE) process to discover what the evidence says about different medications.
Part 1 also includes a short video introduction to the pain medications we’ll dive into in the next three parts in this series.
CLICK HERE to improve your assessment & diagnostic skills with a free trial Clinical Edge membership
