Multimodal analgesia in paediatric palliative care

Abstract

Pain in hospitalized children is very common, under-recognized, and under-treated. In paediatric patients the pain might be not be caused by the underlying serious medical conditions alone, but also by their frequent exposure to painful procedures (e.g. bone marrow aspirations, dressing changes, lumbar punctures, blood draws, injections, etc.). Advanced paediatric pain treatment for children with serious illness usually requires multimodal analgesia, which may include medications from different analgesic classes, procedural interventions, rehabilitation, psychological, and/or integrative (‘non-pharmacological’) therapies that usually act synergistically for more effective paediatric pain control with fewer side effects than any single analgesic or modality.