Articles: pain-management-methods.
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Death at the beginning of life is tragic but not uncommon in neonatal intensive care units. In Portugal, few studies have examined the circumstances surrounding the final moments of neonates. We evaluated the care given to neonates and their families in terminal situations and the changes that had occurred one decade later. ⋯ Despite an increase in the withholding and withdrawing of therapeutic activities and improvements in pain management and family support, many neonates still receive curative and aggressive practices at the end of life.
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Cornell J Law Public Policy · Jan 2011
Refractory pain, existential suffering, and palliative care: releasing an unbearable lightness of being.
Since the beginning of the hospice movement in 1967, "total pain management" has been the declared goal of hospice care. Palliating the whole person's physical, psychosocial, and spiritual states or conditions is central to managing the pain that induces suffering. At the end-stage of life, an inextricable component of the ethics of adjusted care requires recognition of a fundamental right to avoid cruel and unusual suffering from terminal illness. ⋯ Imbedded, necessarily, in this equation is the humane virtue of compassion, charity, mercy or agape. Assertions of state interest in safeguarding public morality by restricting intimate associational freedoms to accelerate death in a terminal illness are suspicious, if, indeed, not invalid. No terminally ill individual suffering from either intractable somatic or non-somatic pain, or both, should be forced to continue living.
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Asian Pac J Cancer P · Jan 2011
Exploration of cancer pain treatment by morphine infusion through an embedded device.
Cancer pain treatment with morphine presents particular problems in patients with renal failure needing haemodialysis. We here explore the various possibilities of intrathecal opioid administration for intractable chronic and acute cancer pain. ⋯ For over 3 decades, there have been numerous reports on non- nociceptive side effects associated with ever increasing long-term intrathecal morphine usage. Our review of the literature and our own experience suggests that a subarachnoid device allows good pain control effect after patient controlled intravenous infusion failure at the time of haemodialysis.
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A young man with acute maxillofacial injuries and a tracheotomy in intense pain was denied pain relief for several days. Intermittent suctioning of the trachea was agonizing. He became psychologically affected to such an extent that he was totally focused on his pain and suffering and unable to make intelligent decisions regarding his future treatment. ⋯ A doctor called in to counsel him found that pain was his predominant problem and treated it. The patient was magically transformed to a sensible person, now thinking straight and promptly consenting for surgery. The author, a doctor himself, learned from this experience what a devastating experience pain can have on the person, that one should look for pain to find it, that most of the time pain can be relieved by simple means, and that relief from pain changes the whole attitude of the sufferer.