[Children in pain: the need for better treatment]

Children in pain is an aspect of nursing and medicine that is almost ignored, evidenced by the almost complete lack of investigations in this field. Many factors impede the effective treatment of pediatric pain such as its difficulty of evaluation, incorrect suppositions and attitudes that discount their pain. It is imperative that medical professionals become cognizant of this shortcoming and begin to remedy it; our children are defenseless and are depending upon our care. The first thing we must do is believe the child all pain is real (if the patient says that it hurts, it hurts.) It is necessary that we apply the same care and precautions to the young as we do for teenagers and adults who are in situations that generate pain and stress. Postoperative care should include a special charting of pain that would become as routine as temperature and blood pressure. So that we might alleviate it, pediatric professionals need to learn evaluation techniques that would allow them to identify types of pain that manifest themselves in particular illnesses. A wide variety of pain-killing therapies are available to us to achieve this goal. Included in this arsenal are the opiates, which we can learn to approximately use when other analgesics are not effective.