Pain in the elderly

According to the Medline database PAIN is:

 "An unpleasant sensation induced by noxious stimuli which are detected by NERVE ENDINGS of NOCICEPTIVE NEURONS".

But thanks to advances in medicine, nowaday this feeling can be defeated, although in the elderly some factors can make more dificult this objective:

1.  Elderly use to be less attended  in the field of health in general due to health is really expensive and resources are limited so research focuses on youth.
2. The cost / benefit ratio is worse in the elderly.
3. Communication problems
4. More time needed

In addition, a lot of people think that elderly trend to complain more than other kind of adults but we can not generalize. During my interships i have found all kind of patient, from patients who go to the emergency for a headache to patients that having a four-stage cancer had not gone to the doctor before. So we have to teach society how to use well the health resources that we have and we should not ignore to patient who complains of pain.

Although we can found many kind of pain, the characteristic of pain in the elderly is that it tends to be chronic. Many studies show that chronic pain its about from 50% in communitary field to 80% in nursing home. It is really easy and cheap give a solution to this kind of pain, even WHO proposed a analgesic staircase limited to a small number of drugs which you can manage pain in 80% of patients in an outpatient.

So, from my point of view and with all this in mind, everybody will be old one day and i suppose that none want to have any kind of pain. For this reason health should not leave out so much the elderly because everybody want to grow old having a good health

Bibliography

• FMC. Dolor crónico en el anciano. Formación médica continuada en atención primaria. 2011 September ; 18:9-23. Available from: http://www.elsevierinstituciones.com/ei/ctl_servlet?_f=1012&id_articulo=90027137&idinst=16

• Ribera J. El dolor en el anciano. Servicio de Geriatría. Hospital Clínico San Carlos. Madrid . 2007 ; 207(4):155-7. Available from: http://www.elsevier.es/sites/default/files/elsevier/pdf/65/65v207n04a13101842pdf001.pdf