[Eight years experience of pain clinics (author's transl)]

The first pain clinic in Japan was organized and operated by anesthesiologists at the University of Tokyo. Today, many universities and large hospitals have set up pain clinics in their anesthetics department and have made great progress in the management of diseases in this filed. Almost all those institutions use oriental methods like acupuncture, ryodoraku and kyo in addition to standard methods. At our pain clinic, nerve block has been the sole method from the beginning. Neither drugs (except carbamazepine, imipramine and ergotamine) nor oriental methods have been used. The pain clinic ought to be separated from the anesthetics department and operated independently, having its own wards.