Nurse in managing pain through psychological approaches essay
In terms of primary and secondary care, a nurse is responsible for considering the variety of psychological factors that contribute to a particular episode of acute pain, which later becomes sub-acute, and then may gain chronic character. This involves patient’s individual characteristics, as well as functional, legal, social and labor issues which could seriously affect the full rehabilitation of a patient and one’s return to normal life. It is important to take care that all of the other medical team members, and family members involved in treatment of a patient fully understand patient’s psychological problems (Mьller-Schwefe et al., 2011, p. 482). This will enable medical staff to not only communicate with patients better, but will also contribute to solving problems more effectively in cases when the recovery is not as fast as it was expected to be.
At the same time medical personnel must also take into account the secondary benefit from preserving disability from chronic pain syndromes which may bear legal, financial or family nature. Sometimes real circumstances may be used by a patient as a “smoke screen”, or excuse for the lack of activity or non-compliance with the prescribed treatment (Karp et al., 2008; Hayes et al., 2012). In fact, any lack of progress in treatment should be interpreted as a physical expression of some psychological barriers to recovery which should be timely marked by a nurse. These barriers should be effectively identified and brought to the attention of a physician, rehabilitation team and patient’s social environment.
Conclusion
Clinical experience and data from numerous experimental studies indicate that the identified physical abnormality does not always correlate with the intensity of pain and degree of disability. It has become apparent that chronic pain cannot be explained through the purely biomedical model, as soon as pain is the result of the dynamic interaction of biological, psychological and socio-cultural factors, and often the latter come to the forefront. In addition, there is a clear relationship between emotional state and cognitive-interpretive processes, which results in reflections affecting the mood, mood affecting the evaluation and, ultimately, the experience and perception of pain. In this regard, in order to achieve success, treatment should be aimed not only at the physical components of pain (elimination of the cause, blockade of pathways), but also at the cognitive, emotional and behavioral factors, and should take into account the psychological characteristics of a patient, as well as the socio-cultural context a patient is in. Achievement of this goal requires a multi-component and individualized approach to treatment through the prism bio-psycho-socio-cultural model of pain.
