Editorial: Regional anesthesiology and acute pain medicine in 2020 and beyond

An enema is a type of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) therapy used to treat severe acute pancreatitis (SAP). The therapy involves instilling a TCM liquid into the rectum and colon through the anus to keep the liquid in the intestine, absorbing through the intestinal mucosa. This study aims to standardize the enema procedure for SAP...

Source: Joseph Donroe, MD, Internal Medicine and Pediatrics, Yale School of Medicine, New Haven, CT
Abdominal pain is a frequent presenting concern in both the emergency department and the office setting. Acute abdominal pain is defined as pain lasting less than seven days, while an acute abdomen refers to the abrupt onset of severe abdominal pain with features suggesting a surgically intervenable process. The differential diagnosis of acute abdominal pain is broad; thus, clinicians must have a...

Diffuse noxious inhibitory control, temporal summation and wound hyperalgesia testing are demonstrated in the obstetric patient. These tests evaluate inhibitory and excitatory mechanisms of pain processing and are here utilized to evaluate endogenous analgesia at different time-points during pregnancy and the peripartum period to help reveal individual s risk for persistent...

Here we present a protocol to perform intracranial pharmacological experiments followed by pain behavior assays in rodents. This protocol allows researchers to deliver molecular and cellular targets in the brain, for pharmacologic agents in the treatment of...

Current pain scales used to quantify pain severity, such as visual analog scales, fail to capture the complexity of subjective pain experiences. Pain body diagrams are qualitative but may be more informative. The goal of this method is to extract quantitative metrics from pain body diagrams using novel pressure-hue...

Persistent postsurgical pain may be related to changes in pain processing. By assessing pain in response to standardized stimuli, changes in pain processing can be elucidated. We present methods to obtain pain thresholds to different stimuli and a measure of endogenous analgesia in patients undergoing breast cancer...