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An official publication of the ACR and the ARP serving rheumatologists and rheumatology professionals

A New Pain PILL: Lending a Personal Approach to Personalized Medicine

David S. Pisetsky, MD, PhD  |  Issue: November 2010  |  

As a scientist, I gravitate toward numbers, especially quantifiable outcome measures, and am a great fan of questionnaires that patients can easily complete. The numbers generated are illuminating, often surprising, and can as readily bolster our clinical impression as refute them. Pennybaker’s index is such a measure. It is therefore with hope and anticipation that I await the day when rheumatologists routinely use this measure in practice and, harkening back to a bygone era, instruct their patients, “Please take this PILL. If you still hurt, please call me in the morning.”

Dr. Pisetsky is physician editor of The Rheumatologist and professor of medicine and immunology at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, N.C.

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Reference

  1. Report of the American College of Rheumatology Pain Management Task Force. Arthritis Care Res. 62: 590–599.

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