Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-g7gxr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-03T00:50:38.743Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

17 - A Patient's Guide to Pain Management

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

Get access

Summary

Some (hopefully not all!) of what you are about to read in this chapter may strike you as quite strange and perplexing. The reason is that since the rise of more scientifically and technologically oriented medicine in the middle of the last century, physicians and laypersons have had very different (and sometimes even conflicting) views about the relationship between pain and suffering and the responsibilities of the medical profession to effectively relieve them. Surprisingly, before the rise of the modern era, physicians took their responsibility to relieve pain much more seriously than they do now. It is as though the less physicians could do to treat or cure disease, the more assiduously they strived to ensure their patients were at least comfortable and certainly not suffering from pain or other distressing symptoms of illness when the means of relief were available somewhere in the physician's toolkit.

With the rise of modern medicine and the many remarkable advances in medical science and technology, many previously incurable diseases became curable or at least manageable for increasingly longer periods of time. As the focus shifted to making a prompt and accurate diagnosis and then selecting and effectively implementing the most appropriate treatment, what appeared to fade into the background was the patient's experience of illness, including pain and other symptom distress.

Pain – and more importantly, the perceived duty to promptly and effectively treat it – receded so far into the background that by the late twentieth century, there arose what only quite recently (at least when considered in the broad scope of the history of medicine) has come to be recognized as an epidemic of undertreated pain.

Type
Chapter
Information
Surviving Health Care
A Manual for Patients and Their Families
, pp. 246 - 263
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2010

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×