"John J. Bonica... recognized during his experience in World War II that he was unable to provide adequate pain relief for many of his patients if he utilized only the methods afforded to him by his training in anesthesiology. He realized that health care providers who had been trained in other specialties and had managed pain for their patients could add a new dimension to both the evaluation and treatment of complex pain conditions that did not respond to his particular treatment. Although perceived by some to be more complicated and more costly because of the intitial multispecialty evaluations and treatments, multidisciplinary team management of pain has proven to be more effective and less costly overall than when pain is managed by different specialists working independently."
John Joseph Bonica was a Sicilian American anesthesiologist and professional wrestler known as the founding father of the discipline of pain medicine.
"The full array of nociceptors is now deluging the nervous system with a blitz of chemical and electrical signals that the late American pain-management pioneer John Bonica called "the inflammatory soup of prostaglandins, protons, serotonin, histamine, bradykinin, pourines, cytokines, eicosanoids, and neuropeptides. Pain now echoes and amplifies itself as nociceptors form circuits and feedback loops, each link in the chain stimulating its neighbors to greater activity."
"The continuum—stretching from a pole of "healing through techniques" to the pole of "healing through management"—is not specific to France. ...the gate control theory of pain—had played a crucial role in the development of pain medicine as proposed by John Bonica. The proposals of this anesthetist date from as early as 1944, but only became widely accepted in 1974. ...with the concept of pain clinics launched in 1953 by John Bonica, physicians had access to an organizational model. By the end of the 1970s, this model was widely accepted in the world of pain medicine. It stipulated that lasting pain—chronic pain... should be treated in specific pain clinics or pain centers by multidisciplinary teams... The justification for such a grouping of people stems from Bonicas 1953 book The Management of Pain, where he analyzes the complexity of problems associated with intractable pain that has resisted any traditional treatment in a number of disciplines. ...any evaluation of pain must be carried out on both the physical and the psychological level."
"Pioneering pain researcher John J. Bonica (1990) believed that being rewarded for pain behaviors is a key factor that transforms acute pain into chronic pain. According to Bonica, people who receive attention, sympathy, relief from normal responsibilities, and disability compensation for their injuries and pain behaviors are more likely to develop chronic pain than are people who have similar injury but receive fewer rewards. Consistent with Bonicas hypothesis, headache patients report more pain behaviors and greater pain intensity when their spouses or significant others respond to pain complaints with seemingly helpful responses, such as taking over chores, turning on the television, or encouraging the patient to rest (Pence, Thorn. Jensen & Romano, 2008)"
"The practice of pain rehabilitation increasingly developed during the twentieth century by evolving medical specialties of physical medicine and rehabiltitation, anesthesia, psychiatry, and occupational medicine. John Bonica, one of the fathers of pain medicine, championed a more comprehensive biopsychosocial multidisciplinary approach in the United States in 1947. This approach expanded to include a team of clinicians at the University of Washington in the 1960s. Bonicas collaboration with Wilbert Fordyce, a psychologist, incorporated operant conditioning and other behavioral approaches with more specialized, structured, and in-patient multi-week programs. In the 1980s, John Loeser formalized a more structured program at the University of Washington. This 3-week long, daily program became a model for interdisciplinary treatment."
"John Bonica formalized the recognition of pain as a clinical entity; the work emphasized the pain syndromes individualized consideration, as opposed to it being thought of as little more than an accompaniment of acute trauma, or an even worse myth, the miserable complaints of neurotic patients who stubbornly refuse to heal. Bonicas formal conceptualization of pain as a disease state within its own right stimulated an ever widening wave of research and clinical application culminating in the newest specialty recognized in Medicine..."
"Dr. John Bonica, professor of anesthesiology at the University of Washington and founder of the Multidisplinary Pain Center, Seattle, spearheaded the movement to recognize pain as an entity unto itself. Bonica and other pain specialists are alarmed by an epidemic of pain throughout the industrialized world. ...He estimates that pain results in the loss of some 700 million workdays a year—in litigation, in compensation, and, mostly, in search for relief."