Bridging the Gap: Promoting Interventional Pain Medicine as a Future for Family Physicians

The use of interventional pain medicine (IPM) has been growing over the past few years, offering relief to patients suffering from acute and chronic pain who have failed conservative therapies. Pain is one of the top complaints that family physicians encounter, yet there is no official pain medicine (PM) fellowship or recognized training program that favors family medicine graduates. Although family medicine residency programs allot a certain amount of time to teaching trainees in PM, this is considerably insufficient and does not dedicate ample time for procedural treatments. This review explains the increasing demand for IPM and provides several arguments for family physicians to provide all aspects of PM, including interventional treatments. It is recommended that pain fellowships recognize family physicians as being ideal candidates for their programs and identify their potential and competencies to perform interventional procedures.