Exploring the nursing role in pain management from a post-structuralist perspective

The way in which discourses influence understandings of pain and the management of pain by nurses has received little attention in the nursing literature. This is particularly apparent with the taken-for-granted practice of using self-reports of pain as the basis for the development of treatment regimes designed to manage that pain. This paper uses a post-structural frame to analyse the way in which pain itself, and the management of that pain, are texts which are discursively constructed. In so doing it opens up possibilities for a 'different' nursing role in the management of pain.