Feb 14 Federal HELP Committee Hearing on IOM Pain Report

On February 14 the U.S. Senate H.E.L.P. Committee will hold a Congressional hearing to review the Institute of Medicine’s 2011 report on pain, Relieving Pain in American: A Blueprint for Transforming Prevention, Care, Education and Research.

A little piece of Massachusetts trivia about this report.  The chairperson of the IOM committee was Philip Pizzo, MD, now the dean of Stanford University’s Medical School. In the 1980’s and 90’s, when I was at Children’s Hospital in Boston, he did his training there and later became the physician-in-chief.  He wrote an editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine published titled 1/16/12, titled “Alleviating Suffering 101 – Pain Relief in the United States”.  It is brief and to the point, worth reading.