Pain therapy and anesthesia

Pain is often an early warning signal and leads people to see a doctor in the first place. The perception of pain and how people deal with it is very individual. There are many reasons for this: the nature of the underlying disease and the accompanying medication play a role, but age, gender and sociocultural conditions also influence how people handle pain.

In principle, acute or newly occurring pain should therefore never be dismissed as a necessary concomitant. Furthermore, the cause of the respective pain must be clarified individually and an underlying disease that is threatening to the patient must be ruled out.

The following principles therefore should generally apply:

• The patient's individual perception of pain must be taken seriously (ethical requirement).
• A high level of patient comfort can contribute significantly to a trusting doctor-patient relationship.
• An acceptable level of pain or, even better, freedom from pain can help to avoid stress-related cardiopulmonary complications, especially in the postoperative or post-interventional course of patients with relevant comorbidity.
• Adequate management of acute pain can prevent chronification of pain.
• Timely awareness and assessment of pain by the attending physician can identify a serious complication of the original intervention.
• Lack of treatment should be considered as failure to assist (legal component).