Texas A&M Professor added to Federal Government Task Force Dedicated to Addressing Opioid Crisis
A Texas A&M psychology professor is serving on the federal government’s Pain Management Best Practices Inter-Agency Task Force, which is comprised of doctors and scientists who are dedicated to addressing the opioid crisis plaguing the United States.
A draft of the task force’s pain management report is to be presented to Congress later this year and will include input from Mary Meagher, the only psychologist assigned to the task force.
With addiction to prescription and non-prescription opiates on the rise in recent years — along with overdose-related deaths — the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services developed a task force in May 2018 whose job would be to formulate recommendations for Congress in regards to the massive health issue. According to a press release from Texas A&M’s College of Liberal Arts, the task force is comprised of 29 experts, with only two neuroscientists — one of whom is Meagher.
“Our charge was to focus on chronic pain and how pain management affects our current crisis,” Meagher said Wednesday. “… [it was] to identify the gaps and inconsistencies in how we treat acute and chronic pain, and to develop recommendations for improving gaps.”
The task force members communicate mostly through online meetings but have convened in person several times. They had a public meeting in September during which they heard testimony from interested parties outside their own group structure. They also shared personal testimonies of how their own friends and loved ones had been affected by the opioid crisis, Meagher said.
In December, the HHS Department publicly released the task force’s report, which may be presented to Congress later this year. Its key concepts are many and include a need for individualized patient-centered care, risk assessment per patient history, access to care, resistance to stigma, education and many other factors. Meagher, who has researched the psychology of pain and pain management since the 1980s, offered her expertise in regards to psychological treatment. She had been nominated to the task force by the American Psychological Association, with her specialty in study having included the biobehavioral mechanisms that influence pain in the human body.
“My role has been [related to] the integration of psychological services into pain management,” she said. “Access to that care would involve psychologists being trained more in pain management.”
Meagher explained that when an individual is injured, often in the United States they receive support from a health insurance company to seek treatment for the physical aspect of the pain he or she feels, not the psychological aspect. Because psychological care is so often uninsured in regards to physical pain, many psychologists do not actively seek to practice this type of therapy. Mostly such treatment is seen with veterans whose health care is overseen by the Veterans Administration.
Ideally, Meagher said, she would like to see more psychologists treating pain sufferers with interventions such as acceptance and commitment therapy [ACT], cognitive behavioral therapy [CBT] and mindfulness-based stress reduction [MBSR], just to name a few methods. She also would like to see more physicians trained to understand the psychological aspects of pain management.
“There needs to be a restructuring in how pain management is done, to increase access to pain psychologists and make changes to third party payer roles,” she said.
The HHS report can be read at http://bit.ly/painmanagementreport.