Articles: chronic-pain.
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Chronic pain is a leading cause of morbidity in children and adolescents globally but can be managed with a combination of traditional Western medicine and integrative medicine (IM) practices. This combination has improved various critical health outcomes, such as quality-of-life, sleep, pain, anxiety, and healthcare utilization. These IM practices include acupuncture, yoga, biofeedback, massage, mindfulness, or any combination of these modalities. The current manuscript developed a budget impact model to estimate the institutional costs of implementing these practices among adolescents. ⋯ IM leads to improved pain relief when combined with traditional medicine and yields significant cost-savings, thus supporting the routine implementation of IM alongside traditional medicine in healthcare settings.
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Historically in medicine and beyond, the understanding of and treatment of pain is based on finding tissue injury. The fact that for chronic pain, there often is no (longer) any traceable tissue injury, in combination with the fact that pain essentially is a private experience, poses a challenge for clinical communication. This paper therefore examines how pain is linguistically and interactionally constructed as invisible. ⋯ The discussion explores how on these three levels, notions of the abnormal or deviant body come into play, in which patients and health professionals complexly construct pain both as not normal (i.e. not a neutral or desirable state of being), while, at the same time, the lack of traceable tissue injury is constructed as medically normal for chronic pain. This also shows how patients and healthcare providers often orient to the stigma around chronic pain.
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Curr Pain Headache Rep · Jan 2025
ReviewCryoneurolysis for Post Operative Pain Following Chest Surgery: Contemporary Evidence and Future Directions.
Management of acute and chronic pain following surgery remains a critical patient management challenge, with poor pain management associated with negative patient satisfaction, increased opioid consumption and a high incidence of adverse events. Chest surgery specifically carries a high incidence of significant early and chronic post operative pain. The high incidence, prolonged duration of pain, and adverse effects associated with chronic opioid analgesia, has given rise to the need for non-opioid pain management strategies. ⋯ While cryoneurolysis was first developed over fifty years ago, its utilization was limited by technical implementation challenges and limitations in identifying target structures percutaneously. Advances both in cryoneurolysis delivery devices as well as ultrasound have reinvigorated interest in the technique, with recent studies highlighting the advantages of cryoneurolysis, including its favorable side effect profile, long duration of efficacy and relative technical simplicity. The purpose of this review is to examine techniques for cryoneurolysis, and explore recent evidence for safety and efficacy of the technique following different surgical procedures.
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Reg Anesth Pain Med · Jan 2025
Deciphering risk factors for severe postherpetic neuralgia in patients with herpes zoster: an interpretable machine learning approach.
Postherpetic neuralgia (PHN) is a common complication of herpes zoster (HZ). This study aimed to use a large real-world electronic medical records database to determine the optimal machine learning model for predicting the progression to severe PHN and to identify the associated risk factors. ⋯ Leveraging machine learning analysis, this study identifies an optimal model for predicting severe PHN and highlights key associated risk factors. This model will enable the establishment of more proactive treatments for high-risk patients, potentially mitigating the progression to severe PHN.
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Reg Anesth Pain Med · Jan 2025
Comparative StudyComplications and opioid-prescribing patterns following genicular nerve radiofrequency ablation versus intra-articular injection: a matched cohort study.
Genicular nerve radiofrequency ablation (GNRFA) is an emerging procedure used to relieve pain from severe knee osteoarthritis. While there have been rare reports of significant complications, their incidence has not been well established. The objective of this study was to examine complication rates at 30 and 90 days post treatment as well as characterize opioid-prescribing patterns before and after treatment. ⋯ Our study demonstrated that GNRFA possesses a safety profile similar to that of intra-articular injections although significant adverse events such as venous thromboembolism and septic arthritis may occur rarely. Although opioid utilization generally increased in the 30 days after ablation compared with intra-articular injection, similar reduction in opioid consumption at 6 months was seen in patients with prior opioid use in the ablation and control cohorts.