Bringing pain relief to children: a guide to practical management

摘要

When I first read the title I somehow expected a new guide to paediatric pain relief, but very soon discovered that this was not the book's primary focus. Bringing pain relief to children: treatment approaches delves mainly into service provision and how to efficiently supply pain management to children in several diverse settings. As the editors boldly state in their preface, it "puts pediatric pain in its place".The table of contents seemed promising, with chapters proceeding quite naturally from hospital-based pain management to treatment in the outpatient setting, end of life care, residential pain treatment and pain management at schooi. These were followed by miscellaneous chapters on the uses of alternative medicine and information technology, pain management in developing countries and knowledge translation from research to clinical practice.Each chapter is based on a keynote talk given at the Fifth International Forum on Pediatric Pain, Nova Scotia, Canada, 2004. Most of this book was thoughtprovoking and well written, but it also contained the odd tedious section, certainly in the vein of the conference where each speaker would have conveyed his own individual style.