Chronic pain is a condition affecting many US adults and leading to such negative health outcomes as sleep disturbance, depression, and difficulty in performing daily activities. This paper will describe the elements of the PICOT question related to this condition. The PICOT question is as follows: In adults aged 18-55 years, what is the effect of multimodal pain management in comparison to opioid therapy on pain control over six months?
The selected population is adults aged 18-55 years who have chronic pain. This group was chosen because individuals within this age range are more frequently affected by chronic pain than older adults. In a large study assessing pain management in adults with chronic pain, 70.9% were aged 18-64 (Groenewald et al., 2022). Thus, the PICOT question is intended to examine the effect of different pain management techniques on this population.
The intervention, the effectiveness of which is to be evaluated, is multimodal pain management. This pain management technique involves using a combination of several pharmacologic medications from different drug classes. Combining various drugs helps manage both neuropathic and nociceptive pain and can address concomitant symptoms, such as insomnia, anxiety, and depression (Delle & Gazley, 2021). This pain management technique has become widely used in the clinical setting recently.
Multimodal pain management will be compared to opioid therapy. Opioid use is so common in clinical practice today that it has led to the opioid epidemic. It is estimated that 130 Americans die every day because of opioid overdose resulting from both prescribed and illicit opioid use (Renda & Slater, 2021). Thus, there is a need to search for safer alternatives to manage chronic pain.
The outcome to be assessed is pain control, manifested by patients’ relief from pain. Clinicians and researchers often use patient assessment tools, which help identify the patient’s pain level (Renda & Slater, 2021). As for the time, the PICOT question will cover the range between three and six months. This timeframe is realistic and manageable because it is long enough for patients to experience the effects of the intervention and short enough to reduce the number of participants lost to follow-up.
References
Delle, J. M., & Gazley, C. (2021). Advocating for multimodal pain management and reducing the need for opioids in the acute and chronic pain setting. Nursing Clinics of North America, 56(3), 357-367. Web.
Groenewald, C. B., Murray, C. B., Battaglia, M., Scaini, M. S., & Quinn, P. D. (2022). Prevalence of pain management techniques among adults with chronic pain in the United States, 2019. JAMA Network Open, 5(2), 1-4. Web.
Renda, S., & Slater, T. (2021). Nonopioid management of chronic pain. Journal of Radiology Nursing, 40(1), 23-29. Web.