Everyday pain management ideas

When children have fibromyalgia, it hurts.  It really hurts.  And from what research on this topic suggests, the pain continues for years, sometimes lasting into adulthood. Traditional thinking would suggest that there must be some kind of medication to help these kids get their life back.  But in reality, that's not the case! Research at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (known affectionately as CHOP) have come to realize a different approach to this problem.  Their treatment protocol consists of a combination of physical and occupational therapy.  They also discontinue all pain and sleeping medications that the patient may have been prescribed prior to coming to CHOP. The researchers followed 64 children in this program.  All of the subjects suffered from fibromyalgia for about 2 years prior to beginning treatment at CHOP. At the start of the study, the average pain rating for the group was 7.1 on the 1 to 10 scale.  A few weeks into th...

Pain management in children can be extremely challenging. For one thing, due to the fact that their physical and mental development is still an ongoing process, they cannot always verbalize what they are really feeling.  Medication dosages change as children develop from infancy to adulthood. One of the toughest things is getting a read on the severity of pain.  The methods used to date such as FACES scale are less than ideal.  Sad but true, many things experienced in childhood can cause acute or chronic pain.  Consider childhood cancers or juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, for example.  Ouch! As published in the June 1 edition of Pediatrics, a new way to assess pain in children was validated at Rady Children's Hospital in San Diego.  This novel approach uses facial recognition software to study the changes in a child's facial expression over time to assess the severity of pain. This is exciting if you ask me--hopefully it will go a long way to h...