1.18 Pain Management

The past chapters already addressed some background of the pain experience and techniques of distress management.

Please reflect on the following:

R1.18.1 What do you remember about the time course of the patients’ pain perception during medical procedures under standard care conditions? What role does time play?

R1.18.2 What do you think hurts most? All of these options start out with injection of local anesthetic into the skin and needle stick. Enter your choice in the box below.

a. Angiography (placing small, < 2mm diameter plastic tubes into blood vessels, injection of some contrast dye)

b. Kidney drainage (placing a plastic tube of about 3-4 mm diameter into kidney from the back to drain urine)

c. Breast biopsy (placing a biopsy device into breast tissue)

d. Tumor embolization (very invasive, going into blood vessels and injecting high concentration of chemotherapy and or particles to deprive tissue of blood supply)

R1.18.3 Can you think of times where something that would hurt under normal conditions didn’t bother you as much? What were the circumstances that made you “forget” that a stimulus could be disagreeable or hurtful?

R1.18.4 What has been shown to make the pain experience worse?