Pharmaceutical Approach vs. Non-Pharmaceutical Approach for Chronic Pain

Literature Review on Pain
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Literature Review on Pain
The literature review section focuses on the past research areas on the topic and its relation to this research study. The literature review focuses on the research question: Will veterans suffering from chronic pain and are treated with chronic behavioral therapy (CBT) achieve a more significant reduction in pain and physical dysfunction compared to the veterans with chronic pain treated with ibuprofen and gabapentin over a period of eight weeks of treatment?
Pain is a significant natural alert that there is something wrong with the body and could trigger potential health risk if not treated. Pain can take the form of physical or emotional form. In either case, the consequences of pain are often harmful to the body and cannot be ignored. Apart from causing physical dysfunction such as the inability to move and perform normal tasks, emotional pain attracts stress in affected individuals. Chronic pain is the worst of all because it does not go away. There is, therefore, a need for intervention for aging veterans to find the best alternative to manage and handle this type of pain. Pharmaceutical approach focuses on the use of medicinal intervention, while CBT focuses on the use of behavioral changes. Different research techniques have been used to validate the efficacy of each of the two interventions.
Takai, Mitani, Abe, and Suzuki (2015) carried out a research study to investigate the impact of physical activities in pain management. The four scholars define chronic pain management as an intervention strategy that modifies the behavior of the patient. Positive response to physical exercise among the aging population was noted, compared to those that did not engage in physical exercises. The scholars noted that even though pharmaceutical approach such as the use of drugs were also effective in the management of chronic pain, patients exposed to pharmaceutical drugs complained of side effects rising from too much intake of ibuprofen compared to those that were exposed to physical exercises. Tai et al. (2016) found that even though Gabapentin and Ibuprofen are found to be effective in the treatment and management of neuropathic pain, participants exposed to the use of these drugs still complained of other types of pain in spite of having completed the dosage for the assigned period. This made the researchers to conclude that pharmaceuticals do not treat all types of pain.
There are always two types of pain that individuals are likely to suffer. While it is true that emotional pain hardly attracts physical pain, physical pain is a direct cause of emotional/psychological pain. Psychological pain often arises when an individual cannot move around comfortably or attend to normal duties (Hancom, Brox, & Bunnage, 2015). The best intervention method for treatment should, therefore, be the one that addresses both physical and psychological pain. Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) has been documented as the best intervention method in the treatment of psycholog...