Articles: pain-management.
-
Recently, digital tools, such as smartphone-based applications and the use of artificial intelligence have increasingly found their way into pain medicine. This could enable new treatment approaches in postoperative pain management. Therefore, this article provides an overview of various digital tools and their potential application options in postoperative pain management. ⋯ The use of digital tools, although so far integrated in clinical routine in a relatively selective and exemplary manner, promises to be an innovative approach for personalized postoperative pain therapy in the future. Future studies and projects should help to integrate the promising research approaches into everyday clinical practice.
-
To compare patient-reported outcomes before and after implementation of evidence-based, procedure-specific opioid prescribing guidelines. ⋯ Prescribing guidelines successfully reduced opioid prescribing without increased refill rates. Despite decreased prescribing overall, there was a continued reluctance to prescribe no opioids after surgery. Although most patients experienced good pain control, there remains a subset of patients whose pain is not optimally managed in the era of reduced opioid prescribing.
-
Mayo Clinic proceedings · Aug 2023
ReviewQuestioning the Right to Pain Relief and Its Role in the Opioid Epidemic.
The new discipline of palliative care helped to establish the right to pain relief at the end of life and the necessity of using opioids to achieve that goal. Professional pain organizations followed the United Nations' model for universal human rights in their declaration of a universal right to pain management. Both palliative care and pain medicine specialties worked to establish pain as a legitimate focus of medical treatment separate from its association with disease. ⋯ This understanding of opioids as having distinct and separable analgesic and addictive potential was challenged by the 1970s discovery of an endogenous opioid system, which integrates pain and reward functions to support survival. Our modern pain neurophysiology places the patient with pain in a passive position from which it makes sense to assert a right to pain relief. To prevent future opioid epidemics we need to abandon clinical outpatient use of pain intensity scores and redefine the medical necessity of pain treatment as less about the reduction of pain intensity and more about the capacity to pursue personally valued activities.
-
To evaluate subsequent shifts to patient access to tertiary pain management care following shelter-in-place (SIP) and increased telehealth during the COVID-19 pandemic. ⋯ Overall, accessibility to pediatric pain management through telehealth during SIP was maintained despite significant declines in overall access to health care, with some trends in increased accessibility for patients with government insurance.
-
An opioid task force within an urban public health district sought to increase access to, and utilization of, non-opioid, nonpharmacologic alternatives for pain management. ⋯ Participants with chronic pain were open and willing to try a novel way to access nonpharmacologic consultations to address unmet pain needs. Virtual consultations with pain management experts may increase access to, and utilization of, complementary and integrative treatment modalities.