Pain Management and Assessment for Healthcare Practitioners: Review Article

Abstract

Agaezi Onwuasoanya DC

Pain is an unpleasant feeling, produced by the brain indicating damage or potential injury to the body. The assessment of a patient’s experience with pain is a crucial component in providing effective pain management. Accordingly, effective pain management ought to include ways to reduce pain, increase comfort, improve physiological, psychological and physical function and increase most importantly increase satisfaction with pain management. In return this comprehensive pain assessment should not only allow for the healthcare professionals to describe the pain, make evaluate and make decisions about the pain, but also it could perhaps produce positive outcomes for the patient. Pain is subjective and thus only the patient can really know what he or she is feeling. In health care there are ways to go about assessing a patient’s pain including self-report assessment and asking the patient information about his/her pain. However, the question is which way of exploring and assessing maybe more suited and is more effective for pain management. This paper examines the reliability of several widely used methods to assess patient’s pain for healthcare practitioners and to determine which method is more suited and useful.

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