Pain research & management : the journal of the Canadian Pain Society = journal de la société canadienne pour le traitement de la douleur
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To determine whether the nonspecific effects that occur following the use of sham interventions to treat nonspecific low back pain (LBP) are large enough to be considered clinically meaningful. ⋯ The present best-evidence review found a clinically meaningful change in pain scores following the use of sham oral medications for the treatment of nonspecific LBP. This finding suggests that further clinical research is warranted to identify which patient subgroups could benefit most from such treatment and to distinguish the true contribution of the placebo effect from other nonspecific effects.
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Facial expression is widely used to judge pain in neonates. However, little is known about the relationship between intensity of the painful stimulus and the nature of the expression in term neonates. ⋯ Little difference was noted in eye and eyebrow movement between pain intensities. The mouth opened wider (vertically) in neonates experiencing the higher pain stimulus. Qualitative differences in neonatal facial expression to pain intensity may exist, and the mouth may be an area in which to detect them. Further study of the generalizability of these findings is needed.
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The current study investigated whether active distraction reduces participants' experience of pain more than passive distraction during a cold pressor task. In the first experiment, 60 participants were asked to submerge their hand in cold (2°C) water for as long as they could tolerate. They did this with no distraction, and then with active (electronic gaming system) and passive (television) distraction, in randomly assigned order. ⋯ They also had more enjoyment, less anxiety and greater reduction in pain with active distraction than with passive distraction. There was no effect of suggestion. These experiments offer further support for the use of electronic games as a method of pain control.
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The Iconic Pain Assessment Tool (IPAT) is a novel web-based instrument for the self-report of pain quality, intensity and location in the form of a permanent diary. Originally designed for people with central poststroke pain, the tool is being adapted for a larger, more diverse patient population. The present study aimed to collect evaluative feedback on the IPAT from a heterogeneous sample of individuals with chronic pain. ⋯ Written and verbal feedback from individuals with a variety of chronic pain conditions (n=23) were collected in the context of these objectives. Overall, the IPAT was positively endorsed by this heterogeneous sample of people in pain. The authors concluded that the IPAT is a user-friendly instrument that has the potential to help people express, document and share their personal experience with chronic pain.
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A number of variables reflecting attentional and emotional mechanisms of processing pain-related information have recently attracted interest, ie, fear of pain, pain catastrophizing, hypervigilance and attentional bias to pain. These variables can be assessed by explicit measures based on conscious self-report, or by implicit measures assessing mainly preconscious stages of information processing such as behavioural or electrophysiological tests. Convergent validity within implicit measures was assumed to be high, as was the discriminant validity between implicit and explicit measures. ⋯ All variables appeared to be only weakly associated. The attempt to organize the field of variables targeting attentional and emotional mechanisms of processing pain-related information using concepts such as implicit and explicit measures failed as far as the present test on convergent⁄discriminant validity proved.