Pain management nursing : official journal of the American Society of Pain Management Nurses
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The use and misuse of opioid pain medication is a public health problem that has extended to pregnant women. Assessing both the use and misuse of opioid pain medication had been limited. ⋯ The high rates of use and misuse of opioids in pregnant women underscores a critical need for screening for opioid use and misuse, particularly among White women. Pregnancy provides a unique window of opportunity to educate, screen, and provide treatment.
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Nurses who care for hospitalized patients are responsible for ensuring adequate pain management is provided in a safe manner. The clinical challenge is balancing the effective control of the patient's pain with the side effects of administering opioids. The aim of this literature review is to explore the evidence on how nurses assess for opioid-induced sedation and advancing respiratory depression and how they integrate those data in their critical thinking skills when deciding to administer opioids for pain. ⋯ This review revealed a lack of evidence between how nurses assess for opioid induced advancing sedation and excessive respiratory depression, and the impact, including the adverse events associate with acute pain management.
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A plethora of statistics and claims exist concerning the rise in prescription opioid use and the increase in opioid-related deaths. Eleven misperceptions were identified that underlie some of the growing national concern and backlash against opioid use. Misperceptions include the number of opioid overdose deaths, the quality of government-sponsored data and guidelines, the impact of opioid dose escalation on overdose risk, postoperative opioid use associated with long-term use, and the link between prescription opioid use and heroin initiation. Implications for research, practice and education include (a) a call for improvement in data recording, (b) unbiased and clear reporting of information, (c) a call for health care providers to ask critical questions when presented with data, and (d) a call for policymakers to avoid unnecessarily restrictive practices that are founded in fear and may cause unintended harm to patients in pain.
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Addiction is a chronic, relapsing brain disease. It is not the same as physical dependence (i.e., withdrawal) and tolerance, but is characterized by loss of control over the use of the substance, continued use despite consequences, compulsive use, and cravings. Addiction involves functional changes to brain pathways involved in reward, stress and learning, and these changes can last a long time after the addictive substance is no longer used. Repeated interruption of normal brain function from repetitive use of addictive substances can hijack normal reward mechanisms resulting in fundamental alterations in brain structure and function. Over time, addictive substances can bring about a false fixed prediction error that cannot be rectified during learning. ⋯ Addiction can be treated and controlled, but not cured. Treatment of pain in individuals with addiction is a complex clinical challenge. Holistic assessment, interprofessional approaches, use of established guidelines, and non-pharmacological complementary modalities are needed.
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The current opioid addiction crisis highlights two chronic health conditions which have traditionally received relatively little emphasis in nursing curricula: addiction and chronic pain. In an effort to provide direction to nursing programs in the US on the curriculum needed to prepare students to care for patients and meaningfully intervene in the opioid crisis, this paper presents an overview of the curricular elements which require integration. ⋯ Both addiction and chronic pain are sources of suffering for patients; the key role nursing can play in reducing the experience of these illnesses in these vulnerable populations is critical to addressing the opioid addiction crisis.