Pain Management Articles Open
Acute pain is one of the most common symptoms, for which physicians are consulted. It is a symptom informing the organism about tissue insult (caused by injury, disease, surgical procedure, or childbirth) in order to prevent further damage. Acute pain is an unpleasant sensory, emotional and mental sensation (experience) associated with vegetative signs, psychological response and changes in behavior. It usually lasts for several hours to days, rarely more than a month. Acute pain makes the patient seek medical help within minutes, hours or a few days after the onset of pain. If this signal is ignored, pain may become chronic. Acute pain is provoked by identifiable stimuli and disappears as soon as the tissue injury or damage that had caused it is healed. Postoperative pain is a typical example of acute pain. All surgical procedures are associated with a certain level of postoperative pain. Fear of postoperative pain is one of the greatest concerns of patients undergoing surgery. A number of studies conducted in countries with a highly-developed
health care system demonstrated that even in the first decade of the 21st century, postoperative pain was not managed well in onethird to one-half of patients. Yet it seems that there is some kind of progress over time. In the Czech Republic, for example, in epidemiological studies conducted by J. Málek et al. in 2006, 18.5% of patients considered pain to be the worst experience in the postoperative period and in 36% of cases pain was an important source of complaints after surgery. In 2014, the study was repeated at the same department (the results have not been published yet) and revealed that less than 20% of respondents suffered from severe pain, none of the patients reported excruciating pain and 6 hours after
surgery the incidence of severe pain fell below 10%.
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