Fisiología y evaluación del dolor en la consulta de enfermería.

Résumé

Pain is a very common problem in the general population. The majority of the population lives with chronic pain or has suffered from it in some period of their life. Furthermore, cancer patients in advanced stages have a 90% prevalence of pain. OBJECTIVE: The general objective of this work is to collect the most information on the physiology of pain and its evaluation by means of a bibliographic review. METHODOLOGY: This work has been developed through a bibliographic review of documents related to pain. Scientific databases such as Cochrane, Pubmed, Scielo, Medline and national and international scientific journals such as Pain, Revista de la Sociedad Española del Pain, The Clinical Journal of Pain, etc. have been used. RESULTS: According to the International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP) it is defined as “an unpleasant sensory or emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage, or described in terms of such damage”. Pain is subjective and exists whenever a person expresses that something hurts. The expression and manifestation of this depend on the experience lived by the individual and the use of the word in early life experiences. Patients can present pain from multiple causes such as the disease itself (tumor infiltration), as a result of treatments (chemotherapy or diagnostic tests), related to their immobility situation, or generalized weakness or other pathologies derived from any disease. CONCLUSION Before starting to treat pain in patients, a comprehensive assessment of it is necessary, since a large part of them do not verbalize the pain, and the consequences it has on the functional state of the patient. Carrying out this assessment is important to carry out a diagnosis that allows us to adapt the treatment so that it is effective and subsequently be able to evaluate it.10,11