Patient education in pain control

Patients' concerns about reporting pain and using analgesics have been cite d as major contributors to the problem of inadequate pain management. The p urpose of this paper is to describe a program of research in which we have focused on these patient concerns, or as we refer to them, "patient-related barriers to pain management." We present a summary of descriptive studies on this topic, describe educational interventions that have been tested, an d suggest future avenues of research and practice.