Biopsychosocial Approaches To Healthcare

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Introduction: Biopsychosocial approaches to healthcare is concerned with the biological, psychological and social aspects in contrast to the strictly biomedical aspects of disease. It looks at how an illness or disease affects an individual physically, psychologically and socially. I am going to discuss these aspects in relation to pain associated with bone cancer. Patients with bone cancer can experience a variety of pain – emotional and physical. In my essay, I will discuss the physiological and psychological issues and how a nurse can facilitate the patient in coping with their pain caused by the bone cancer. Physiological Issues: Cancer that starts in the bone is rare; it is more common for the cancer to spread to the bone from another part of the body. Bone cancer pain can either be described as acute or chronic. Acute generally results from tissue damage and occurs early on in the diagnosis. It usually lasts three months or less. Chronic pain, however, is persistant. It usually lasts much longer than three months. With bone cancer, pain can result from the disease process as well as from bone cancer treatments. Severity of pain depends on many aspects – the site and stage of the disease, a patient’s age, personality, pain threshold and past experiences of pain (Sabino et al. 2005). For many patients pain is the first sign of cancer. According to (Sabino et al. 2005) 30-50% of all cancer patients will experience moderate to severe pain. Pain can be present at any stage of cancer, however the frequency and intensity increases with advancing stages. 75-95% of patients suffer from significant pain. From these figures we can see that pain is a huge side effect of cancer and appropriate treatment is essential for any patient’s physiological and psychological well-being. There are two main components recognised with bone cancer pain. The first is

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