This won t hurt
researchers say that more than 40 per cent of patients with chronic pain are misdiagnosed. It affects men and women equally and is undertreated in children, according to reports presented at a seminar of the American Medical Association (ama) held in New York recently (British Medical Journal , Vol 315, No 7102).
Neil Schechter, director of the department of behavioural and developmental psychology and his colleagues at St Francis hospital, Hartford, Connecticut, have designed a programme that can easily be duplicated with no additional expenditure. While conducting the study, they found that there was no uniform method to determine the level of discomfort experienced by children, no place to record the information and no agreement on which medications could be given to relieve pain. Some doctors were using inappropriate pain-relieving methods such as injecting a drug called Demerol that led to several complications in children (Pediatrics , Vol 99, No 6).
Most of the children did not divulge pain caused by a disease and surgery just to avoid an injection. Several children were found to be suffering from pain that was mainly due to bad planning. For instance, drawing out blood for multiple purposes was never coordinated that resulted in multiple pricking with needles. To streamline the system, the researchers have devised standardised procedures for assessing pain, and its relief. The method expects nurses to ask children of eight years and older to rate their pain on a 1-10 scale where 10 being the level of worst pain.
According to them, severe post-operative pain should be treated with continuous infusion of morphine or other opiods rather than weak drugs or intramuscular injections. When they have to be pricked with needles, a suitable anaesthetic should be used.
Schechter's
Related Content
- Order of the National Green Tribunal regarding violation of environmental norms during the execution of the Netravathi Waterfront Promenade Project, Mangaluru, Karnataka, 05/03/2024
- Mainstreaming biodiversity in forestry
- The economic case for LNG in Asia is crumbling
- Global employment trends for youth 2022: investing in transforming futures for young people
- Air quality life index: annual update 2022
- The distributional impact of a carbon tax in Asia and the Pacific