Many people who have a colonoscopy, a comprehensive but often painful screening test for colon cancer, complain that they are not adequately sedated. Researchers who set out to determine whether patients could get better results by controlling the sedation themselves found that these patients had no less pain than those who were sedated normally.
Colonoscopy is one of several tests for colon cancer.
This type of cancer will kill approximately 56,000 people in the U.S. this year, and many of these deaths could be avoided with early detection. The study from Haifa, Israel, compared normal sedation with patient-controlled sedation to see whether the test might be more easily tolerated if the patients could determine when they needed more medication. The researchers found that allowing patients to push a button and receive more pain medication did not lead to them having any less pain overall than patients who were given more pain medication by the doctor. Both groups of patients used the same amount of medication. Although there was some concern about the safety of allowing patients to give themselves more medication, both groups tolerated the colonoscopy equally well.