Joe Osaben

Pain management is an aspect of medicine and health care involving relief of pain (pain relief, analgesia, pain control) in various dimensions, from acute and simple to chronic and challenging. Most physicians and other health professionals provide some pain control in the normal course of their practice, and for the more complex instances of pain, they also call on additional help from a medical specialty devoted to pain, which is called pain medicine. Pain management often uses a multidisciplinary approach for easing the suffering and improving the quality of life of anyone experiencing pain, whether acute pain or chronic pain.

An emergency physician (often called an “ER doctor” in the United States) is a physician who works at an emergency department to care for ill patients. The emergency physician is a specialist in advanced cardiac life support (advanced life support in Europe), resuscitation, trauma care such as fractures and soft tissue injuries, and management of other life-threatening situations.

A general practitioner manages types of illness that present in an undifferentiated way at an early stage of development, which may require urgent intervention. The holistic approach of general practice aims to take into consideration the biological, psychological, and social factors relevant to the care of each patient's illness. Their duties are not confined to specific organs of the body, and they have particular skills in treating people with multiple health issues. A core element in general practice is continuity that bridges episodes of various illnesses. Greater continuity with a general practitioner has been shown to reduce the need for out-of-hours services and acute hospital admittance.

Interventional pain management or interventional pain medicine is a medical subspecialty defined by the National Uniforms Claims Committee (NUCC) as, "invasive interventions such as the discipline of medicine devoted to the diagnosis and treatment of pain related disorders principally with the application of interventional techniques in managing sub acute, chronic, persistent, and intractable pain, independently or in conjunction with other modalities of treatment."

Osteopathy is a type of alternative medicine that emphasizes physical manipulation of the body's muscle tissue and bones.