Pain, palliative care, palliative medicine, regional anesthesia, pain medicine

Demand for anesthesia and analgesia for the frail elderly is continuously increasing as the likelihood of encountering very elderly, very vulnerable, and very compromised patients has, ever so subtly, increased over the last three decades. The anesthesiologist has, increasingly, been obliged to offer professional services to frail patients. Fortunately, there has been a dramatic improvement in medications, methods of drug delivery, critical monitoring, and anesthesia techniques. Specific methodologies peculiar to the frail are now taught and practiced across all anesthesia subspecialties...

Critical limb ischemia (CLI) is limb pain occurring at rest or impending limb loss as a result of lack of blood flow to the affected extremity. CLI pain is challenging to control despite multimodal pharmacologic analgesia and surgical intervention. We describe the successful use of a continuous local anesthetic infusion via an infraclavicular nerve catheter to control severe refractory ischemic upper limb pain in a patient with metastatic lung cancer for whom surgical and pharmacological intervention was unsuccessful...

BACKGROUND: Preoperative anxiety is a common problem in pregnant women undergoing elective cesarean section. We aimed to determine the anxiolytic effects of chewing gum in pregnant women undergoing elective cesarean section under regional anesthesia. METHODS: This was a single-center, prospective, randomized controlled trial. Sixty-six women were randomly assigned to either the control group (n=33) or gum group (n=33) in a 1:1 ratio. In the gum group, the participants chewed xylitol gum for at least 10 min/h, regardless of fasting...

Due to the severity of their disease, palliative care patients often present complex clinical symptoms and complaints like pain, shortness of breath, nausea, loss of appetite, and fatigue. Solely relying on the information available from the history and physical examination often causes uncertainty among palliative care physicians regarding treatment decisions during home visits, potentially leading to unnecessary hospitalizations or transfer to cross-sectional imaging in radiological practices. A rational approach is essential to avoid diagnostic aggressiveness while still providing the imaging information required for optimal palliative care...

Patients in the palliative phase of a disease often suffer from pain, which leads to a significant reduction in quality of life. Since in most cases there is a progression rather than an improvement of the disease over time, pain therapy must also be dynamically adapted. Due to accompanying symptoms and the physical burden of the disease, treatment of pain is often difficult. In the palliative situation, pain should not only be understood as an excitation of nociceptors but is rather also an expression of mental stress...

BACKGROUND: Motor-sparing regional anesthesia modalities, such as periarticular infiltration (PAI) and pericapsular nerve group (PENG) block, have become the mainstay of multimodal approaches used during total hip arthroplasty (THA). We hypothesized that the postoperative analgesia of the PENG block was non-inferior to that of the PAI. METHODS: Sixty patients were randomly allocated into two groups. The PAI group were injected with 100 mL of cocktail solution (ropivacaine 20 mL, ketorolac 2 mL, and epinephrine 1 mL mixed with normal saline) in periarticular tissues directly by the surgeon...

BACKGROUND: Multiple myeloma is a cancer of plasma cells that often leads to complications including osteolytic bone lesions, nephropathy and neuropathy. Multiple myeloma is only one etiology of many cancer pain conditions that may necessitate interventional pain treatment when refractory to multimodal medications. Notably, local anesthetic systemic toxicity is a rare but life-threatening complication of local anesthetic administered for these interventions. CASE PRESENTATION: A 50-60-year-old woman presented with multiple myeloma complicated by chronic bone pain and in an acute pain crisis...

In the face of ongoing drug shortages, anesthesiologists have been described as having to become "Iron Chefs, challenged to create safe patient outcomes with missing ingredients. Unfortunately, developing responsive ethical guidance for how anesthesiologists should best handle ethical concerns with ongoing and mutable drug shortages is limited by the dearth of studies examining how bedside clinicians actually experience drug shortages and what ethical challenges they encounter. In order to better understand what ethical concerns individual anesthesiologists experience around drug shortages and how they negotiate them, we undertook this qualitative interview study...

BACKGROUND: Critical limb ischemia (CLI) is limb pain occurring at rest or impending limb loss as a result of lack of blood flow to the affected extremity. CLI pain is challenging to control despite multimodal pharmacologic analgesia and surgical intervention. We described the successful use of a continuous local anesthetic infusion via a popliteal nerve catheter to control severe refractory ischemic lower limb pain in a patient who failed surgical intervention and performed a brief narrative literature review on regional anesthesia for ischemic pain...

We present 10 of the most effective articles from 2016 in geriatric medicine. They address wide-ranging topics including the use of antipsychotics for delirium in palliative care, fall prevention and mobility interventions, efficacy and potential risks of testosterone, cranberry capsules and their effect on bacteriuria and pyuria, beta-blockers after acute myocardial infarction in a nursing home population, the effect of a healthy lifestyle on disability, a goals-of-care intervention in individuals with advanced dementia, the benefits of regional anesthesia in hip repair, and mindfulness in chronic pain management...

Palliative care prevents and relieves total pain of patients and their families and improves their quality of life. The author describes the work of anesthesiologists in palliative care unit as ward staffs. The need for palliative care units is increasing and new palliative care units are being established throughout Japan. Anesthesiologists are involved in anesthesia, pain management intensive care, emergency medicine and palliative care. The anesthesiologists in palliative care are involved in use of opioid and nerve block for treating physical pain...

There was an era when bark of mandrake plant, boiled in wine was used to administer anesthesia. Ether, after reigning the kingdom of anaesthesiology for more than a century, came to be superseded by newer and newer agents. Anaesthesiology has witnessed tremendous developments since infancy. The introduction of advanced airway adjuncts, labour analgesia, patient controlled analgesia, fibreoptics, Bispectral Index monitors, workstations, simulators and robotic surgeries are only to name a further few. Anaesthesia for robotic surgery received much impetus and is still a dream to come true in many countries...

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