Pain Interventions
A PICOT question is a tool that bears consistency based on developing researchable and answerable questions. This particular paper is going to show how a PICOT question gets developed. Individuals all over the globe suffer from pain, and this number continues to rise each year. Pain can transform into chronic pain defined as episodes of discomfort lasting for seven months or more; it can be viewed as intermittent or continuous (Taylor, Lillis, & Lynn, 2025). Therefore, individuals can suffer from various experiences concerned with chronic pain originating from a variety of illnesses, injuries, or diseases. Some well-known causal agents of chronic pain are previous injuries, unknown agents, diabetic neuropathy, post-surgical pain, osteoarthritis, and fibromyalgia. It is of great importance that healthcare officers recall that pain gets viewed as subjective experiences, and only the patients reporting them can feel the pain. The healthcare community must take this issue with the utmost seriousness.
Similarly, the pain tends affecting every area in a patient’s life since it effectively increases stress hormones in an individual’s body. This particular stress hormone increase affects all the systems in the body (Bauer, Tilburt, Sood, Li, & Wang, 2016). This issue of chronic pain is turning out to be widespread in the world, thus forcing medical communities to pose questions like; what next can we do to curb chronic pain? However, this next PICOT question directly addresses that issue.
Do individuals affected by chronic pain discover high pain controls using complementary or alternative therapies mixed with proper medication as compared to only drugs in twelve months? This particular topic is discussed further in detail, as addressed in the following paragraphs.
I had to choose this topic since my mother is suffering from severe pain daily. She got diagnosed with osteoarthritis, fibromyalgia, and various diseases that make her uncomfortable most of her time. I found out that her therapists take time before recommending her to other alternative modes of treatment to ease her pain; instead, they subject her to more medications. These medications don’t ease her pain; instead, she experiences more pain. The mastery of this topic will help me understand ways that can allow me to manage my mother’s illness.
Alternative and complementary therapies serve as ways that promote relief or healing pains that bear a non-pharmacological in existence (Mehl-Madrona, Mainguy, & Plummer, 2016). Examples of these pain healing ways include meditation, herbal-based remedies, yoga, and massage. Alternative and complementary therapies are used around the world in different cultures. These methods have proven more positive outcomes for patients with health issues. It becomes more interesting when medical communities integrate the therapies under westernized traditional medicine practices.
Various barriers need to be, therefore, overcome when the medical community opts to implement these alternative and complementary therapies that get mixed with pharmacological pain relief methods. There exist, facilitators, that implementation of alternative and complementary medicines. An example of such facilitators is termed consumer demand (Becker et al., 2017). An example of barriers is a deficit in knowledge among providers in healthcare settings (Becker et al., 2017). A specific idea to overcome this barrier is through the implementation of an evidence-based practice project in clinics associated with relieving pain. This project will include compulsory training based on mandatory and alternative medicine and essential ways that would incorporate them into regular practices. The trained healthcare providers would document these therapies that got implemented for every patient. Later these providers would observe how the treatments have affected the overall outcomes of each patient. This project receives evaluated by conducting a critical study based on how these therapies positively or negatively impacted pain relief and total patient satisfaction. This evaluation gets done by sending patients satisfaction surveys and direct patient interviews to effectively gather patient thoughts on alternative therapies. However, the most crucial attribute of this evidence-based project is that it gives patients excellent pain relief.