A Review of the Emerging Procedures of Analgesia in Patients with Acute Pain who Presented in the Emergency Medicine Department

The existence of pain among patients is still one of the main causes of referring to the emergency departments. In this regard, special medical physicians of emergency staff should be responsible for treatment of the various levels of pain (acute to chronic) as well as management of pain induced from various kinds of illnesses or/and injuries. The treatment should be performed considering the harm limitation induced by analgesics. Inadequate pain treatment which is common in the emergency departments results in negative impacts on patient care. This exacerbated by improperly pain assessment and the possibility of using unsafe analgesics. As a result, emergency physicians always face a challenge in providing satisfactory analgesia while minimizing side effects either inside the emergency department or after hospital discharge. The present study aimed to recognize various methods of analgesia for emergency medicine physicians, provide them with different methods of pain relief and the way of use based on the patient’s condition, and to improve their quality services. In this study, an extensive review of the scientific databases and search engines of PubMed, HubMed, MEDLINE, Science Direct, MedlinePlus, Scopus, and CINAHL were performed to achieve detailed publications on the pain management methods in the emergency situations. Afterward, the high-quality articles which were published from 2005 to 2019 on the issue of pain management methods in the emergency medicine department, were selected for further investigation. Although acute pains are mostly treated using non-opioids analgesics such as acetaminophen and nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), the treatment of acute moderate to severe pains mostly requires opioid agents. Moreover, effective pain management in the emergency situations may be included the interventions through the application of Lidocaine intravenous, gabapentinoid agents, and different nonpharmacological analgesia agents. This study was performed with the aim of recognizing and evaluating the pros and cons of the available agents to provide the most appropriate methods for pain management in emergency medicine departments. Additional research is required on the safety and effectiveness of non-opioid treatment methods of analgesia within the emergency department.