Pain Medicine

The Department of Pain Medicine at Xuanwu Hospital, Capital Medical University, was established in September 2003, with the mission of “Relieving Pain for the People.” It leverages the strengths of Xuanwu Hospital as the National Medical Center for Neurological Diseases and the National Clinical Research Center for Geriatric Diseases. Using image-guided and neuroelectrophysiology-guided minimally invasive nerve intervention techniques, it treats various chronic intractable pain conditions and difficult-to-treat pain disorders and has now become a renowned pain medicine department in China and abroad. The department undertakes multiple national-, provincial-, and ministerial-level research projects and is China’s only postdoctoral mobile station and doctoral training site in pain medicine. It is the only pain center recognized by the State Food and Drug Administration as qualified to serve as a drug clinical trial institution.

The department currently has a total of 25 medical and nursing staff members, including 4 chief physicians, 3 associate chief physicians, and 5 attending physicians; 8 hold doctoral degrees and 4 hold master’s degrees. Its annual outpatient volume currently exceeds 30,000 visits. Each year, it admits more than 2,000 patients with intractable and difficult-to-treat pain and completes more than 2,000 image-guided interventional procedures. Every year, it trains more than 70 doctoral students, master’s students, and visiting physicians, accumulating extensive experience in teaching and training.

Using advanced minimally invasive techniques, the Department of Pain Medicine treats conditions including intractable neck, shoulder, lower-back, and leg pain; trigeminal neuralgia; cervicogenic headache; cluster headache (sphenopalatine neuralgia); postherpetic neuralgia; visceral pain; cancer pain; and pain caused by benign tumors. The department routinely performs internationally advanced treatment techniques, including low-temperature plasma target ablation, trigeminal nerve radiofrequency treatment and microballoon compression, spinal cord stimulator implantation, intrabody morphine pump implantation, continuous epidural target-controlled microinfusion, and a series of rehabilitation techniques.