Commentary: A worldwide call for multimodal inpatient treatment for children and adolescents suffering from chronic pain and pain-related disability.

摘要

Children and adolescents presenting to clinicians with chronic pain and severe interferences in their daily life, such as school absence, reduced contact to peers, and emotional, sleep, and eating problems (Palermo, 2000) are not very well cared for worldwide. In contrast to children, a recent review illustrated the therapeutic network for affected adults in Germany with 18 centers in Bavaria alone providing multidisciplinary treatment programs (Arnold et al, 2009). For children, there are only four multimodal inpatient programs worldwide that have been described and evaluated in terms of their effectiveness, despite the fact that a noteworthy number of children and their families are severely affected by chronic pain and in need of multimodal inpatient treatment.