Due to copyright restrictions or inability to secure permission some of the following subjects contain highlights only. However we have provided the URL to each article. Continuous fetal heart rate monitoring . Despite numerous published guidelines, current literature continues to document that acute pain, such as postoperative pain and pain in the emergency department, is often poorly managed. A major contributor to this problem of undertreatment is the reluctance of physicians to prescribe adequate opioid therapy.
Patients have the right to the best pain relief possible .
There is no recorded risk in the medical literature of direct permanent organ damage with the long term clinical use of opioid therapy. This is in contrast to most other classes of analgesics in use today. Fear of causing respiratory depression has often been invoked as a rationale for not using opioids to treat pain. It is now widely accepted that respiratory depression caused by opioid analgesics tends to occur largely in opioid-naive patients. It is a short-lived phenomenon that tends to be antagonized by pain.