Journal of pain and symptom management
-
On admission to a pain management unit, 92.5% of 174 cancer patients suffered from more than moderate pain despite prior treatment. This inefficacy was mainly due to underdosage of drugs, inadequate intake schedule, and hesitation to use strong opioids. Following introduction of an oral drug therapy based on World Health Organization (WHO) guidelines, more than 80% of all patients described their pain as ranging between "none" and "moderate" on a six-step verbal rating scale at all times. ⋯ Step III (strong opioids) gained more and more importance with time, and step I (nonopioids) was finally useful only in a minority of patients. Side effects played a minor role as a reason to change therapy. Oral drug therapy following these guidelines led to sufficient pain control in most patients over the whole study period (7,400 days); only 11% of the patients required other methods of pain management.
-
The purpose of this study was to determine if nurses and physicians selected similar words to describe painlike experiences and to determine how they rated terms commonly used to describe pain. Thirty-seven registered nurses and 21 physicians comprised the sample. The Visual Analogue Scale (VAS) was used to measure the terms ache, hurt, and pain. ⋯ There was no significant differences between the nurses and physicians in the mean rating of any of the pain terms on the VAS. The nurses and physicians chose very similar word descriptors from the MPQ to discriminate one pain term from another. These findings suggest that nurses and physicians may have a common understanding of the language used to describe painlike experiences.
-
Pain in children from the neonate to the teenager has recently begun to achieve the attention it deserves in the medical literature. Practitioners have been slow to apply both old and new techniques in this patient population. This review focuses on the perioperative management of pain and its associated symptoms in pediatric patients.
-
Pain in neonates has only recently become the focus of clinical and research attention. Measurement of pain in this population presents special problems. ⋯ Nurses used similar classes of behavior to indicate pain, but varied somewhat in the specific behavioral indicators for different levels of pain. A very wide range of sources of pain was identified.
-
Much recent attention has focused on the development and refinement of pain measures, as well as on the use of more effective pain control methods for infants, children, and adolescents. This article reviews the primary categories of pediatric pain measures, with a specific focus on the selection of the most appropriate behavioral, physiologic, or subjective method for assessing a child's pain. The optimum pain measure depends on the age and cognitive level of a child, the type of pain experienced, and the situation in which the pain occurs. While no single measure is adequate for all children for all types of acute, recurrent, and chronic pain, it is possible to choose practical, valid, and reliable methods for evaluating any child's pain experience.