Protocols on Pain Assessment and Management in Modern Medicine

Course overview

Pain assessment is considered a pivotal aspect of modern medicine. In a broader sense as a concept, pain assessment involves a comprehensive clinical judgment describing and analyzing pain based on the type, significance, and context of the patients' experience. Describing pain with these assessment tools can be either difficult or easy depending on the demographics of the patients. In pediatric pain assessment, pre-verbal and developmentally disabled children might find it extremely difficult to properly describe the nature and severity of pain. In most cases, modern protocols for pain assessment in this population advise the use of behavioral tools in place of self-reported pain models. Medical personnel handling sessions of pain assessment in the pediatric population are trained to recognize, gauge and document different behavioral cues necessary to improve pain assessment in children. In the geriatric population, pain assessment is more multidimensional, requiring the consideration of different behavioral and physiological cues.