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Pain assessment and control have received increasing attention as a quality issue in medicine. However, pain has rarely been addressed as a cost-containment issue.

We performed a single-center retrospective analysis of information abstracted from the medical records of 1445 adult patients who were treated in family medicine clinics and referred to specialists in Rochester, Minnesota, USA. Patients were categorized into frequent utilizers of physician visits and others, with those having more than eight medical visits in the previous 6 months being classified as frequent users. General pain was self-assessed using a 10-point scale. Multiple logistic regression analysis was used to test the relationship between pain and the frequency of visits, after adjustment for co-morbidities, body mass index (BMI), and demographic characteristics …