Painful memories

Painful memories

A young boy touches a hot oven plate. Heat sensors in his palm realise that the temperature exceeds a minimum safety threshold and activate sensory nerves in the hand. Within milliseconds, the information is passed on through the arm and the spinal cord to the brain. The brain interprets the incoming information as pain, registers that the hand is in danger of being burned and orders it to retr...

Children's memories for painful cancer treatment procedures: implications for distress.

Children (ages 3 to 18, N = 55) diagnosed with leukemia were tested for their memories of lumbar punctures (LPs), a repeated and painful part of the cancer treatment protocol. Memory for both event details and the child's emotional responses was assessed one week after the LP. Children of all ages displayed considerable accuracy for event details, and accuracy increased with age. Overall recall...

Patients' memories of painful medical treatments: real-time and retrospective evaluations of two minimally invasive procedures.

Patients' memories of painful medical procedures may influence their decisions about future treatments, yet memories are imperfect and susceptible to bias. We recorded in real-time the intensity of pain experienced by patients undergoing colonoscopy (n = 154) and lithotripsy (n = 133). We subsequently examined patients' retrospective evaluations of the total pain of the procedure, and related t...

Painful Memories: Reliability of Pain Intensity Recall at 3 Months in Senior Patients

Background. Validity of pain recall is questioned in research. Objective. To evaluate the reliability of pain intensity recall for seniors in an emergency department (ED). Methods. This study was part of a prospective multicenter project for seniors (≥65 years old) treated in an ED for minor traumatic injury. Pain intensity (0-10 numerical rating scale) was evaluated at the initial ED visit, at...

Memories