Pain medicine education among American neurologists: a need for improvement.

To assess pain medicine education, surveys were mailed to practicing neurologists (PNs) and residency program directors (PDs). Thirty percent of PNs felt adequately trained to diagnose and 20% to treat pain disorders. PNs stated that more pain education is needed for resident training (89%) and for PNs (91%). PDs ranked the importance of a pain subspecialty seventh out of eight subspecialties; only 29% reported having a neurology pain specialist on the faculty. These data strongly suggest a need to improve the pain medicine education of neurologists.