Beyond Narcotics for Effective Pain Management

Correspondance Narcotics for chronic nonmalignant pain

I an article in CMAJ’s rheumatology series, Simon Huang states that “narcotic analgesics should be avoided in patients with chronic musculoskeletal pain.” Nothing could be further from the truth. The general consensus as stated in guidelines on the use of narcotics as well as among physicians dealing with chronic pain disorders is that narcotics are almost certainly underutilized in the treatme...

Pain Management beyond Nsaids

According to the International Association for the Study of Pain, pain is an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage, or described in terms of such damage. Language is used to describe sensations and emotions, but it is not a prerequisite for feeling these; i.e. lack of ability to verbally communicate in no alters the perception of pain in h...

Barriers to effective pain management.

In this article my sole aim is to engage the reader to think about the management of pain in a different way. I have deliberately taken a less formal style but provided references if you are interested in following up. The management of pain has often been assumed to be a routine part of care, in fact in the perioperative arena it is the second most common nursing intervention (Juntilla et al 2...

Laboratory management: preliminary analysis of narcotics evidence.

Moving beyond pain scores: Multidimensional pain assessment is essential for adequate pain management after surgery

BACKGROUND Clinical experience teaches us that patients are willing to accept postoperative pain, despite high pain intensity scores. Nevertheless, relationships between pain scores and other methods of pain assessment, e.g. acceptability of pain or its interference with physical functioning, are not fully established. Our aims were to examine these relationships. METHODS A cross-sectional st...