Treatment of Cancer - Essay Example

Treatment of Cancer Chamberlain College of Nursing [Session] Introduction: This paper isprimarily based on a largely spoken and clinically significant issue regarding the treatment of cancer and adopting various beneficial strategies for that. What with the intense and overwhelming pain experiences frequently by the cancer patients, timely availability of medications proves to be the cornerstone of the pain relief. The critical concern regarding the pain treatment in cancer patients is the long waiting time one has to put up with in a hospital in an order to get the caregiver increase the medication dosage for pain relief purpose.

Pain relief is typically called analgesia and this is considered to be a profoundly effective means of controlling pain of those patients who have to cope with aggravated malignancy. Patient-controlled analgesia or PCA is a highly effective pain relieving strategy valued highly by the health professionals owing to the huge merits it is capable of offering. With PCA, the cancer patients can avoid long waiting hours in the morose hospital environment hoping to see their doctor soon enough for timely treatment and pain relief.

(Ellis-Christensen, 2011). This way, patients are left to deal with reduced episodes of excruciating pain as a result of which, less amounts of medication is required in contrast to the regular situation in which the pain relieving medication is given to the patient according to a fixed schedule. Understandably, it is the patients themselves who play the key role in PCA, because they have to determine how much medication is to be received by them at particular times, regardless of analgesic technique and for this purpose, correct assessment of medication dosage is critically important.

PCA is basically a method of cancer treatment and relieving pain related to that by giving the patients freedom to self-administer drugs. There is enough amount of the analgesic drug stored in the infusion pump which is connected to IV inserted inside the patient’s body and during acute pain attacks, he/she can promptly press the button controlling the pump. Mostly, intravenous infusion of opioid drugs is talked about when discussing PCA. In an order to escape myriad complications erupted by an unwanted rise in the drug dosage, the patients need to be excessively careful about appropriately using the electronically controlled infusion pump required for intravenous morphine infusion at times of aggravated pain.

Latest infusion pumps are introduced now with more innovative features like self-dosing option, durability, close-error detection, safety alarms, and easy-to-relate-to programming capability. (Cummings & McGowan, 2011). PCA is particularly beneficial and recommended for those cancer patients who cannot take oral medications despite having to deal with overwhelming pre or postoperative pain. PCA is considered to be a highly useful source of pain control in the cancer population owing to the prompt rise in medication dose it offers in case of acute pain.

“No PCA” restriction is also applied in many situations where a high risk of over dosage is presented or where the state of the cancer patient is highly critical and slight fault in programming can produce devastating results by under or over dosage of an analgesic. References: Cummings, K. & McGowan, R. (2011). “Smart” Infusion Pumps are Selectively Intelligent. Retrieved from http://www.fda.gov/MedicalDevices/Safety/AlertsandNotices/TipsandArticlesonDeviceSafety/ucm245160.htm Ellis-Christensen, T. (2011). What Is Patient-Controlled Analgesia?

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