Why carry out this study?

Treatment of non-cancer pain in the United States and globally continues to face significant challenges, resulting in emotional and societal costs.

The future of pain management continues to be debated on a daily basis. Those involved in pain management, including patients, officials, and physicians, are focusing on advances. However, these advances, and the future evolution of interventional pain management, may be based on lessons learned in the past and present.

What was learned from this study?

This review illustrates substantial variations in the management of chronic non-cancer pain.

The review also illustrates the evolution and numerous issues related to the opioid epidemic, and growing utilization and costs of numerous available modalities, and the demise of multidisciplinary clinics in conjunction with increasing disability.

Future research and advocacy efforts will be necessary to demonstrate the benefit of multidisciplinary clinics and multimodal approaches to the management of chronic pain in order to improve the quality of life and provide appropriate access to effective modalities of treatments focusing on non-opioid therapy.