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Health professionals discuss alternatives to opioids for pain relief

"We have to find a way to get patients off these medications much sooner than we do right now, and I think that's where these alternative therapies will be a big help."

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (KTHV) - More than 200 doctors, nurses and pharmacists came together at UAMS Saturday for the Arkansas Pain Management Symposium. The event comes amid Arkansas's on-going opioid epidemic.

"We have a lot of patients who are overdosing from these medications and also heroin," said symposium director Dr. Johnathan Goree. "And we wanted to have a discussion of how we can better treat chronic pain in the state."

Goree is Director of Interventional Pain Management Services at UAMS. He specializes in helping patients who have chronic pain -- some of them on opioids -- find relief through alternative treatment.

"We have to find a way to get patients off these medications much sooner than we do right now, and I think that's where these alternative therapies will be a big help," he said.

Alternative therapies discussed at the symposium included injections, epidurals, spinal cord stimulation, cannabis, and non-opioid mediations to help treat chronic pain.

"You see people that are able to play with their grandchildren again, able to walk to the mailbox, things they haven't been able to do in years, said Dr. Christopher Paul, a pain management specialist at UAMS. "There are a lot of people that are at home are not able to fully participate in activities in daily living, and these [treatments] really allow them to live life again."

Goree said the symposium is an example of engagement among Arkansas physicians trying to address the opioid epidemic while helping patients deal with chronic pain.

"What I'm hoping for is a change in chronic pain practice -- just an introduction of many of the modalities we're talking about today into practice so that when physicians see someone that's in chronic pain their first response isn't just to write a prescription," Goree said.

Click here for more information about the UAMS pain clinic.

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