Hearing from pain: using ethics to reframe, prevent, and resolve the problem of unrelieved pain.
OBJECTIVE
To describe three ways by which the field of medical ethics can be used to improve health professionals' capacity to assess and treat pain.


CONCLUSIONS
Three strategies could be used to sensitize health professionals to patients suffering chronic pain and improve their capacity to communicate with such patients: classroom opportunities to explore the biases and assumptions that guide our interpretation and response to pain, curriculum designed to enhance communications skills when interacting with and treating patients in pain, and more representative ethics cases that feature the issue of pain.
Blacksher
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Midwest Bioethics Center, Kansas City, Missouri 64105, USA. Erika@midbio.org