Dr. Sandra Cifor

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.

Anesthesiology, anaesthesiology, or anaesthesia is the medical specialty concerned with the total perioperative care of patients before, during and after surgery. It encompasses anesthesia, intensive care medicine, critical emergency medicine, and pain medicine. The core element of the specialty is the study and use of anesthesia to safely support a patient's vital functions through the perioperative period.

Hospital medicine is a medical specialty that exists in some countries as a branch of internal or family medicine, dealing with the care of acutely ill hospitalized patients. Physicians whose primary professional focus is caring for hospitalized patients only while they are in the hospital are called hospitalists.