PAIN is “an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage, or described in terms of such damage.” In settings where pain is poorly controlled, patients suffer needlessly and may develop untoward emotional and cognitive responses that negatively affect behavior, rehabilitation, and quality of life. Providing rapid and effective relief of pain remai...

P ain represents the chief complaint for nearly half of all emergency department (ED) and outpatient clinic visits in the United States, and as much as it pains the first author to admit it (being a resident physician himself), residents are the frontline clinicians who encounter these patients. Despite available resources, residents often are illprepared to manage these patients, particularly ...

OBJECTIVE To investigate morbidity related to misuse of over-the-counter (OTC) codeine-ibuprofen analgesics. DESIGN AND SETTING Prospective case series collected from Victorian hospital-based addiction medicine specialists between May 2005 and December 2008. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Morbidity associated with codeine-ibuprofen misuse. RESULTS Twenty-seven patients with serious morbidity were ...

OBJECTIVE To illustrate a system-level, simulation-based approach for evaluating mitigation strategies to address the dramatic rise in abuse, addiction, and overdose deaths associated with the use of pharmaceutical opioid analgesics to treat chronic pain. SIMULATED INTERVENTIONS: Making available drug formulations with increased tamper-resistance, prescriber education programs, and programs tha...

Challenges with opioids (e.g., adverse events, misuse and abuse with long-term administration) have led to a renewed emphasis on opioid-sparing multimodal management of trauma pain. To assess the extent to which currently available evidence supports the efficacy and safety of various nonopioid analgesics and techniques to manage trauma pain, a literature search of recently published references ...

Pain represents a complex experience which can be approached by various medicines. Non-opioid and opioid analgesics are the most common drugs used to manage different types of pain. The increased attention nowadays to pain management entailed concomitantly more frequent adverse drug reactions (ADRs) related to analgesic use. Drug-drug interactions can be sometimes responsible for the adverse ef...

Chronic pain is a common reason for medical visits, but prevalence estimates vary between studies and have rarely included drug treatment data. This study aimed to examine characteristics of chronic pain and its relation to demographic and health factors, and factors associated with treatment of pain with opioid analgesics. A chronic pain module was added to the 2007 Kansas Behavioral Risk Fact...

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Opioids, the wonderful analgesics, remain the mainstay in the clinical management of moderate to severe pain. However, development of analgesic tolerance and increase in pain sensitivity are some of the major concerns following opioid treatment. Studies suggest that NMDA receptor-mediated intracellular events play a role in mediating these effects. Moreover, NMDA receptor antagonists effectivel...