Gary Fybel - Admin. Director

This program has undergone changes along with many others in the field—namely a shift from what used to be a multidisciplinary pain center operated with a staff of about 15, to primarily an outpatient program today.  The average total cost of the program in 1998 was about $16,000  The Pain Center, as it was known four years ago, was housed in the McDonald Center. That program has been closed. Pain management is now centralized within the Scripps Center for Integrative Medicine.

Among the therapies offered:

Acupuncture is based on traditional Chinese medicine that describes some 2,000 acupuncture points in the human body, connecting with pathways, or meridians, that conduct energy, or qi ("chee"), to regulate spiritual, emotional, mental and physical balance. Acupuncture is believed to balance the opposing forces of yin and yang, keep the normal flow of energy unblocked and restore health to the body and mind. It may be combined with drugs to control surgery-related pain or used to lower the need for conventional pain-killing drugs. In 1998, a Harvard University study estimated that Americans made more than 5 million visits per year to acupuncture practitioners.

According to Dr Bonakdar, acupuncture is one of the most effective complementary and alternative medicine therapies as an adjunct to conventional pain relievers.

Biofeedback feeds back physiological information to patients via a monitoring device, helping patients adjust their mental processes to control involuntary bodily processes such as blood pressure, temperature, gastrointestinal functioning and brain wave activity. The most common forms of biofeedback measure muscle tension, skin temperature, electrical conductance or resistance of the skin, brain waves and respiration.

Healing Touch is a non-invasive treatment that may help decrease pain and relieve associated anxiety. In use at Scripps La Jolla since 1993 and now used throughout Scripps, the non-interventional therapy is performed by trained practitioners who have learned to recognize and utilize electromagnetic fields surrounding the human body to stabilize patients, relieve pain and decrease anxiety.

Massage uses manual techniques to positively affect health and well-being. Benefits of massage therapy include stress reduction, relaxation, rejuvenation and many other therapeutic effects.

Mindfulness-based Stress Reduction combines meditation and Hatha yoga to help patients cope with stress, pain and illness via moment-to-moment awareness designed to help them use their inner resources to achieve good health, well being and a sense of control over their lives.

Stress Mastery teaches effective tools such as breathing, meditation, relaxation and guided imagery.

As such, the hospital emphasizes the importance of addressing pain system-wide, where patients and medical staff are encouraged to speak "a common language of pain" to accurately communicate the location, duration, character, intensity and frequency of pain. Nurses, physicians and technicians use of number of simple pain scales to help patients tell them what the pain feels like, what makes it better or worse and what is acceptable to them.