This past summer, Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton signed into law an omnibus health and human services budget bill and in so doing he marked a significant milestone in the recent history of chronic pain management. The bill contained language, introduced by State Representative Deb Kiel and State Senator Jim Abler, authorizing the trial of a new payment arrangement through Medical Assistance, which makes it possible for state recipients of the public health insurance to receive care within an interdisciplinary chronic pain rehabilitation program.

A central tenet of chronic pain rehabilitation is that what initially caused your pain is often not now the only thing that's maintaining your pain on a chronic course. Let’s unpack this important statement. It’s no accident that healthcare providers commonly refer to chronic pain syndromes as complex chronic pain or complicated chronic pain.

When going to a pain clinic, there is one thing that patients should always keep in mind: It’s that not all pain clinics are alike.

More often than not, patients are referred to one or another type of clinic, without knowing that there are different types of clinics with different ways of treating chronic pain -- even when it comes to the same conditions. Moreover, the different types of clinics are not all similarly effective. Research on the effectiveness of different types of common treatments for chronic pain show wide variations in how effective they are.