Pain Management In Nursing

Everyone experiences pain at some point. From the patient in the most dire circumstances in urgent care to the little kid with a sprained ankle. Pain is universal. Yet, it continues to plague individuals all over the world. Pain Management and the post-surgery healing processes are a difficult area to study based on the personal nature of how each individual patient deals with and visualizes their own pain and recovery. Still, nursing researchers and practitioners are constantly looking for methods to improve or augment current pain management practices within contemporary nursing practice. In more contemporary pain management strategies, there is often a tendency to over rely on pharmaceutical medications. Pain is experienced by patients

Further research on alternative methods for pain reduction and management techniques may be able to give some much needed relief to a mass of individuals, not just a handful of patients (Bresler, 2012). Pain can not only harm individuals with the injury, it can cause harm to everyone around them (Bresler, 2012).No one wants to see their loved ones suffer. Also, patients themselves may damage their own personal relationships because of the extremity of pain and how it can isolate an individual (Bresler,

As such, the expected improvements include things like drops in blood high blood pressure, lower heart rates, and reduction of chronic pain symptoms, lessoning of headache pain, and increasing overall pain tolerance (Cornelius, 2010). In situations were patients going into a major surgery were coached with guided imagery, it was “shown to decrease stress and anxiety before and after surgery,” thus helping reduce additional pain issues during the crucial stages of recovery directly after an invasive surgery (Cornelius, 2010). It is a natural and holistic way to approach pain management. It eventually aims “to increase the ability to self-manage pain, and decrease dependence upon medications and medical care” (Bresler, 2012). This may mean increasing an individual’s pain tolerance in order to increase their quality of life as they recover. The previous discussion highlights a clear problem that could possibly be addressed with the proposed method of guided imagery within clinical practice. However, if there is a relationship between the variables here, it will be difficult to discern based on the abstract nature of the data that would be needed. As such, the research questions that drive this research must be well tailored in order to secure a more directed path for the overall research process. The questions for this current research are as