Pain medicine education among American neurologists: A need for improvement

To assess pain medicine education, surveys were mailed to practicing neurol ogists (PNs) and residency program directors (PDs). Thirty percent of PNs f elt adequately trained to diagnose and 20% to treat pain disorders. PNs sta ted that more pain education is needed for resident training (89%) and for PNs (91%). PDs ranked the importance of a pain subspecialty seventh out of eight subspecialties; only 29% reported having a neurology pain specialist on the faculty. These data strongly suggest a need to improve the pain medi cine education of neurologists.