Pain medicine : the official journal of the American Academy of Pain Medicine
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Review
Alternative routes to oral opioid administration in palliative care: a review and clinical summary.
A major goal of palliative care is to provide comfort, and pain is one of the most common causes of treatable suffering in patients with advanced disease. Opioids are indispensable for pain management in palliative care and can usually be provided by the oral route, which is safe, effective, and of lowest cost in most cases. As patients near the end of life, however, the need for alternate routes of medication increases with up to 70% of patients requiring a nonoral route for opioid administration. In order to optimize patient care, it is imperative that clinicians understand existing available options of opioid administration and their respective advantages and disadvantages. ⋯ This review is not designed to be a critical appraisal of the quality of current evidence; rather, it is a summation of that evidence and of current clinical practices regarding alternate routes of opioid administration. In doing so, the overarching goal of this review is to support more informed clinical decision making.
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The aim of this study was to investigate the prevalence and clinical characteristics of basilar-type migraine in the neurology outpatient clinic of a university hospital in China. ⋯ Basilar-type migraine is an episodic disorder and occurred in 1.5% of patients with headache. More than one-half of patients have their first attack in the second and third decade of life. Trigger factors were common, and patients should be educated to avoid trigger factors.
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Prescription drug monitoring programs (PDMPs) are now active in most states to assist clinicians in identifying potential controlled drug misuse, diversion, or excessive prescribing. Little is still known about the ways in which they are incorporated into workflow and clinical decision making, what barriers continue to exist, and how clinicians are sharing PDMP results with their patients. ⋯ Routines for accessing PDMP data and how clinicians respond to it vary widely. As PDMP use becomes more widespread, it will be important to understand what approaches are most effective for identifying and addressing unsafe medication use.