Background: This study aimed to assess anxiety, depression and quality of life (QoL) in patients with head and neck cancer undergoing laryngectomy using comprehensive self-reported questionnaires for a period of up to 5 years. Methods: This prospective observational study enrolled 150 consecutive patients with locally advanced head and neck cancer…

This study aims to investigate Vietnamese pain terms and pain descriptors with a focus on how the McGill Pain Questionnaire (MPQ) words are utilised by the Vietnamese patients. Semi-structured interviews were employed to collect data from twenty-six Vietnamese female cancer patients. The data were analysed using both quantitative and qualitative…

Background: Relief of pain and suffering is an important responsibility of nurses caring for children, and intravenous cannula insertions is the most common sources of pain in hospitalized children. Distraction is recommended to help in minimizing the discomfort of painful procedures. The aim of the study is to examine the effects of pressing a…

Background" Reducing opioid reliance in chronic pain treatment may best be accomplished with interdisciplinary teams. Shared Medical Appointments (SMAs) are one format whereby an interdisciplinary team partners with groups of patients to provide health education and clinical care. The Whole Health (WH) model is an emerging framework whereby…

Background: Few formal instruments exist to assess the communicative competence of patients hospitalized in intensive care units (ICUs). This can limit interventions by health professionals. Aims: To map the categories and instruments for assessing the communicative competence of adult patients with minimal response in ICUs. Methods &…

Augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) has been used by patients with acquired expressive communication disorders as an alternative to natural speech. The use of symbols to express pain, which is intangible, is challenging because designing a series of comprehensible symbols to represent personal experiences such as pain is not…

As the main symptom in palliative care, pain requires careful assessment. Repeating patient answers is one recommended communication technique for helping convey to patients that they have been heard, and to encourage them to say more. We examined 23 episodes where experienced doctors repeat patients' answers with mirrored rhythm and…

Pain is a multidimensional and subjective experience, and an ideal pain management regime needs to be comprehensive, integrative and involve all relevant persons. Multimodal interventions may include pharmacological, physical, social, psychological and spiritual approaches in order to address pain management at a molecular, functional,…

Evaluations that include stakeholders aim to understand their perspectives and to ensure that their views are represented. This article offers a new approach to gaining stakeholder perspectives through crowdsourcing. We recruited a sample of individuals with chronic low back pain through a crowdsourcing site. This sample coded textual data…

Palliative care is specialized medical care offered to persons with serious health conditions, with the goal to relieve or prevent pain and suffering, to manage burdensome symptoms, and to optimize as much as possible the quality of life of patients and their families (Institute of Medicine, 2015). Speech-language pathologists (SLPs) are not…

This article offers a longitudinal computational-rhetorical analysis of biomedical writing on opioids. Using a corpus of 1,467 articles and essays published in the "New England Journal of Medicine" and the "Journal of the American Medical Association" between 1959 and May 2019, this study evaluates diachronic shifts in (a) the…

Metabolic syndrome (MetS) is a growing epidemic related with higher values of blood pressure (BP) and autonomic dysfunction. Scientific evidence has been indicating that functional resistance training (FRT) is superior over conventional (CRT) for muscle fatigue and pain, yet its effects on autonomic modulation (AM), BP and heart rate in MetS are…

Background: Marijuana as an alternative treatment for chronic illnesses has gained popularity over the past several years, and researchers continue to report positive outcomes for a growing number of disorders. Objective: To address the increasing number of individuals with disabilities using medicinal marijuana, this study sought to ascertain how…

Healthcare practitioners are often presented with vulnerable encounters where their professional experience is insufficient when dealing with patients who suffer from illnesses such as chronic pain. How can one otherwise understand chronic pain and develop practices whereby medical healthcare practitioners can experience alternative ways of doing…

The Section on Women's Health (SoWH) is a part of the American Physical Therapy Association and has members who treat sexual health concerns. Although the use of physical therapy to resolve sexual pain concerns among women is well-established, it is not clear how physical therapists adept at addressing sexual health concerns become interested in…