Even Zen philosophy isn’t beyond the Center for Pain Relief’s methodology for treating pain.

“We say in English ‘I have pain,’” said Dr. Alex Cahana, medical director for the UW Center for Pain Relief. “In Zen, they say it differently because it’s not something you own. They say, ‘there is pain.’”

A new center opened earlier this month that can perhaps revolutionize the way doctors look at pain, and it’s quickly making its way into the UW’s medical school curriculum. Students are being exposed to new methods of treating pain and are seeing how impactful the results are.

“[Patients] come [to the center] with the expectation of eliminating their pain, and they leave with the expectation of living with their pain,” said Amanda Braaten, a medical student studying anesthesiology. “It’s getting people to think differently.”

Dr. David Tauben, who specializes in internal medicine and pain management, shared his insights on how pain is treated.

“My vision is pain and suffering are packaged together, and we pull it apart,” Tauben said. “This is your pain; this is your suffering. Pain is not optional, suffering may be.”

Tauben brought out a record of a recent patient who documented pain levels prior to coming in for treatment and after coming out of treatment at the center. While the patient’s pain level hadn’t changed, the patient commented on how better her life had become, despite the pain.

But changing how patients view pain is only part of the center’s practice.

Cahana spoke of a carpenter who had lost his hand and who came to him with phantom pain, or pain associated with the loss of a limb. The carpenter said he felt the nail of a finger piercing the palm of a hand that didn’t exist.

“We built a special box with a mirror, so when the patient stuck one hand in and the stump in the other, it looks like he has a hand there,” Cahana said. “I said, ‘Look at the mirror and just open the hand.’ … We do that for a couple hours, and he’s able to pull the fingernail out. We’re tricking the brain.”

Traditional methods of treatment, Cahana said, are often the wrong approach to pain. Cahana went on to say that ironically, pain is often mistreated by the use of traditional painkillers like Oxycodone and Oxycontin.

“The normal painkillers are the wrong medication, that is what’s so weird,” Cahana said. “They’re designed for acute pain, they’re not designed for chronic pain. Like, I’ve given people anti-epileptic drugs because epilepsy is a nerve disease, and pain comes from nerves.”

To get more students involved in pain education, Tauben is spearheading a committee that’s developing a new model curriculum for medical-student education, which will involve more students gaining experience in the pain center. There is only room for two students per four-week rotation.

“In medical school, we’re not really taught about chronic pain; it’s pain from more of an acute angle,” Braaten said. “So the center for pain relief is sort of unique because it looks at patients differently than how we’ve been taught to look at them in terms of pain.”

Part of the education component of the center is outreach to practicing doctors who weren’t educated on pain.

“Because of the absence of training in medical school and the slipshod, accidental education of pain as residents, doctors are not well educated in how to take care of pain,” Tauben said.

Because doctors are likely to encounter patients with chronic pain, Braaten agreed that chronic-pain education should be a more prominent part of the curriculum.

“I think that in every area of medicine, there are people with chronic pain,” she said. “So many referrals that the pain center gets are from primary providers who don’t really know what to do with their patients.”

Reach News Editor Eric Staples at news@dailyuw.com.