Current opinion in supportive and palliative care
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Curr Opin Support Palliat Care · Sep 2014
ReviewSpirituality and religiosity in supportive and palliative care.
To provide an updated overview about the role of spirituality and religiosity in the way patients with life-threatening illnesses cope, and the importance of providing a comprehensive spiritual assessment and spiritual care in an interdisciplinary team work setting, such as supportive and palliative care. ⋯ The interdisciplinary supportive and palliative care model of spiritual care proposes inclusion of the spiritual domain in the overall screening and history-taking process and spiritual care by all members of the team, including a full spiritual assessment by a professional chaplain. Research in this extremely important field needs to continue growing.
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The purpose of this review is to provide the reader with an up-to-date overview on the biopsychosocial model in cancer pain. ⋯ The biopsychosocial model is a helpful way to comprehensively approach the conceptualization and treatment of pain in cancer patients at all stages of the disease process. We currently have an established base of research on the importance of biopsychosocial model in cancer pain. Our ability to treat patients with cancer pain effectively will improve as we gain a better understanding of which treatments work for which patients.
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Adequate cancer pain assessment using valid and reliable tools is essential for proper cancer pain management. Because cancer pain can be a complex construct, assessment of its many domains should be conducted using multidimensional tools. Furthermore, there is a need to develop a standard, consensus classification system for prognosis of cancer pain. ⋯ Many pain and symptom assessment tools exist for use in the cancer patient, including the Brief Pain Inventory, the McGill Pain Questionnaire, the MD Anderson Symptom Inventory, and the Edmonton Symptom Assessment System, among others. Recent literature reveals the move toward translating these and other tools to electronic applications. Further study is also underway to create a standard, prognostic classification system for cancer pain.
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Curr Opin Support Palliat Care · Jun 2014
ReviewPhenotyping neuropathic pain patients: implications for individual therapy and clinical trials.
The sensory phenotype can be used as a surrogate marker of underlying mechanisms of pain generation and is assessed by tools like the Quantitative Sensory Testing, Patient Reported Outcomes or the Capsaicin Response Test. In order to establish an individualized, mechanism-based treatment of pain, it has to be demonstrated that subgroups of patients with a distinct sensory phenotype respond differently to a certain treatment. ⋯ The discussed trials show the importance of the development of an individualized pain therapy. Up to now, no clinical trial has prospectively used the sensory phenotype as an inclusion or stratification criterion. Academic researchers and pharmaceutical industry should be encouraged to implement this approach in future trial designs.