Abstract

Pain is an unpleasant feeling and experience that is caused by a potential or practical injury and its control is so important that the American Pain Society has introduced pain as the 5 vital sign for emphasizing the importance of pain and controlling it. Almost all humans have experienced moderate to severe pain and most of the time the experience has happened following surgical procedures, medical conditions or trauma. When pain th LETTER TO EDITOR manifests in a clinical condition, health care staff are responsible for following it and relieving it as a goal and responsibility. Pain affects all individuals regardless of age, sex, race, and socioeconomic status and untreated pain can negatively affect various systems of the body and lead to many consequences. Increase in serum level of cortisol, nor epinephrine, and renin angiotension, hyperglycemia, decrease in insulin, manifestation of anxiety, cardiac effects such as ischemia, dysrhythmia, increase in pulse, increase in cardiac load, increased oxygen uptake, increased blood coagulation potential, hypertension especially in patients with head injuries, decreased blood oxygen level, increased body fluid volume, drop in blood potassium, fatigue, muscle cramps, decreased immune system function, decreased ability for wound healing and etc. are among the undesirable side effects of pain. In addition, not treating acute pains also leads to bearing unnecessary pain, elongated duration of hospitalization, increased medical costs and probability of acute pain progressing and developing into chronic pain. The financial burden of not treating pain in America has been estimated to be about 100 billion dollars per year.

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