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If you are a child's guardian, please ask your child's primary care physician or specialty physician to make a referral to the Pain Management Clinic
Children sometimes experience some kind of pain when they're in the hospital or visiting a clinic. How much pain your child has will depend on his/her condition and treatment. We are committed to understanding your child's pain and working with you and your child to make your child as comfortable as possible.
Pain is an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience normally associated with tissue damage or described in terms of such damage. Pain can make it difficult to eat, rest, and sleep. If not well controlled, pain can delay healing by interfering with normal body functions. For example, pain may increase blood pressure, heart rate, and lower the amount of oxygen in the blood.
Your child may act differently from normal when he or she is hurting. He or she may cry, make faces, or move his or her body in a certain way. Your child might also be very quiet and still because he or she is afraid of moving or does not have enough energy to show you how much pain he or she has. All children are different in how they respond to pain and how much pain they can handle. Something that might hurt one child a lot might not hurt very much to another child. It may be helpful to ask yourself how your child has responded to pain in the past.
Your child's nurses and doctors will regularly ask your child where it hurts and how much it hurts using one of the methods listed below. You can also use these methods to measure your child's pain and help your child report his/her pain to the medical team.
We will measure your child's pain based on his/her movements, behavior, and vital signs using a well validated measure of pain.
We will ask him/her to point to one of the faces on this scale to describe how much pain he/she has.
If your child can understand numbers, we will ask him/her to rate his/her pain on a scale of 0 to 10, where 0 means no pain, and 10 means the worst pain imaginable.
Your child's doctor and nurses can work with you and your child to find the best way to help your child's pain, whether it is with medication, non-drug treatments, or both. If your child receives pain medication, your child's doctor will choose the kind and amount of medication that is best for your child's pain and condition. It is important to know that pain can be safely and effectively controlled and that very, very few patients develop addiction to pain medication. It is important to treat pain earlier rather than later because pain may be more difficult to treat if it becomes severe.
You are the best person to help your child handle pain. With your help, your child might do better than you would have expected! We encourage you to try several of these approaches to find out what works best for you and your child.
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