Pain management and psychosocial issues in HIV and AIDS

My goal for this presentation is to provide an overview of the pain experience of patients with AIDS, including focuses on prevalence, common syndromes, and factors that contribute to undertreatment. As a means to dramatize the impact of pain on quality of life, we'll discuss excerpts from a videotape of one of my patients who eloquently expresses the difficulty he had in getting effective pain treatment, and the impact if finally made. Finally, we'll discuss basic management principles, largely adapted from those developed over the past decades for cancer pain, with a special emphasis on issues related to the management of pain in AIDS patients who have a history of substance abuse.