Ayala RE

Language: Spanish
References: 36
Page: 192-201
PDF size: 172.68 Kb.

ABSTRACT

Pain is universally understood as a signal of disease, it is the most common symptom that brings a patient to a physician’s attention. The task of medicine is to preserve and restore health and to relieve pain and suffering. Understanding pain is essential to both of these goals. The rheumatologist “works with pain”. The American College of Rheumatology includes over 170 conditions that fall within the field of rheumatology. For most of them, pain is the hallmark. The ideal treatment for pain is to remove its cause. In some cases this is possible, after diagnosis and initiating treatment but there is a time period before the pain subsides. Some conditions are so painful that rapid analgesia is essential (e.g., gout, intervertebral disc herniation, renal colic, the postoperative sate, burns, trauma, cancer). Analgesics such as acetaminophen, aspirin and nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, are often used by rheumatologists, opioids are seldom used, being the most potent pain-relieving drugs currently available. The physician should not hesitate to use opioid analgesics in patients with acute pain and even in some patients with chronic pain from malignancy or in cases with no malignancy pain as in chronic painful rheumatic or neurologic conditions.

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