Dr. Ted Jones, psychologist and director of Pain Consultants of East Tennessee’s Behavioral Medicine Institute, has published a new study in the SciMed Central Journal entitled “Medication Aberrant Behavior and Time in Treatment: A Descriptive Analysis”.
In the study, Dr. Jones and his staff worked to identify patients who eventually showed problems with their pain medications, called “medication aberrant behaviors”. (Pain Consultants has been a national leader in studying this issue). What he examined in this study was at what point in treatment did people make a mistake? What he found is that for the people that do make mistakes, the great majority of problems happen within the first year of treatment. This has implications for such issues as how often to give patients drug screens during their treatment, and the findings have the potential to save the healthcare industry millions of dollars annually. PCET works however it can to lower the cost of treatment for pain patients.
The study can be found by clicking here.
