Friday, February 27, 2009

Pain Relief Management - What Are The Options

By Kurt Naulaerts

Pain is a sensory and often emotional experience as a result of damage to a part or parts of the body. The experience of pain differs from one person to the next and a low tolerance to pain does not make you a week person compared to someone with who feels less pain. The science of pain relief is called pain management and an area of medicine that is growing in importance especially with the number of complaints that leave a person in continual distress.

While pain relief for many conditions works well under the supervision of trained staff there are many situations where traditional medication is ineffectual. For instance, where there is pain from an accident or something similar, the pain can usually be lessened once the trauma has been treated. The area of pain management is obviously more concerned with situations which involve chronic pain, where the reason or cause is not as obvious and harder to locate.

Pain management under such circumstances relies on the pain relief treatment to be based on dealing with the pain as a completely separate entity to the condition that may actually be causing it. Owing to the nature of pain relief, it has been necessary to bring together professionals from different medical areas to work together for a broader approach.

This method of pain relief also includes psychological techniques for biofeedback, cognitive therapy and the use of yoga and meditation for example. Sometimes pain pathways are set up that continue to transmit the sensation of pain even though the underlying condition or injury that originally caused pain has been healed; this pain is usually treated separately for the condition.

Pain management practitioners are generally experts from various fields within medicine for example psychiatrists, anesthesiologists, neurologists and psychiatrists. A number of these come from areas where the use of drugs is used to help provide pain relief. This pain management team uses the special skills of professionals who will try interventional techniques to control pain.

While this is still a relatively new area of medicine, it is expanding rapidly; the results of which are being watched with anticipation by health care workers everywhere. Pain management is found to be the central focus in the treatment of diseases, like cancer, tumors, serious accidents and long term illnesses. It is the responsibility of nurses, healthcare providers and other pain management practitioners to educate the patients on the management of pain relief in their individual cases. - 15438

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