Dear Frogga -

There is a great demand for highly qualified pain psychologists, at least here in Los Angeles. In know that at most of the larger hospitals offering pain clinics, they have "pain psychologists" on staff, but in my experience, they just tend to be psychologists who happened to get jobs in pain clinics, thereby rendering them "pain psychologists" ipso facto, or ipse dixit, if you get my drift.

By far and away, the best consultation I received was a single 2-hour appointment with a lady who was also a bona fide analyst, back in the summer of 2002. I told her that I had been advised by a guy at THE MAJOR PRIVATE HOSPITAL IN LOS ANGELES that there was nothing I could do about outbursts of anger that I was directing at random third-parties - sales clerks and the like - that it "just went with the territory" to which she basically said "B.S." and handed me a card of a lady (now one of my best friends) who taught Jon Kabat-Zinn's program of Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR, see http://www.umassmed.edu/cfm/srp/index.aspx) and since then baby, it's been Buddha, Dharma and Sangha and I've never looked back!

Put another way, there is suffering, it's cause and what any of us can do about it. And I can think of no higher calling than dispensing that one professionally.

Mike