Essential Pain Pharmacology: The Prescriber’s Guide, to be called hereafter the “Pain Guide,” gives practical information on the use of a wide array of drugs in the clinical practice of pain management. It shows the wealth of pain treatment options available, and gives guidance for the large percentage of patients who may not respond to standard treatments (so-called nonresponders).

It would be impossible to include all available information about any drug in a single work, and no attempt is made here to be comprehensive. The purpose of this guide is instead to integrate the art of managing the patient with pain with the science of pain pharmacology. That means including only essential but useful facts in order to keep things short. Unfortunately that also means excluding less critical facts as well as extraneous information, which may nevertheless be useful to the reader but would make the book too long and dilute the most important information. In deciding what to include and what to omit, the authors have drawn upon common sense and over 50 years of combined clinical experience with patients. They have also consulted with many experienced clinicians and analyzed the evidence from controlled clinical trials and regulatory filings with government agencies.

In addition to new and old drugs for chronic pain, the Pain Guide introduces the use of some nutraceuticals and medical food. When appropriate, these compounds can effectively be incorporated in the management of this patient population in order to ameliorate the patients’ pain as well as improving their overall well-being. Guidance on the use of these compounds in combination with conventional pain therapies can be difficult to locate; wherever possible the authors have provided this information in the Drug Interactions text.