Progress in Palliative Medicine(Symposium,Palliative Care,The 72nd General Meeting of the Society of Tokyo Women\u27s Medical University)

Seamless palliative care among general hospitals, palliative care units and palliative home care should be constructed. Palliative care is often recommended to be carried out by specialists such as palliative physicians, psycho-oncologists, nurses and others to relieve total pain. Since the WHO cancer pain relief guidelines were published in 1986, cancer pain treatment using morphine has become widely used in Japan. Many patients have been relieved from their pain by morphine and methods for treating cancer pain are gradually being improved with the aim of total pain relief. Recently, some new opioids have become available so that opioids other than morphine can be administered to patients. This in turn has caused some oncologists to perform opioid rotation simply because of their inability to control the side effects of morphine. It is very important to know that morphine is still the mainstay of opioids even now that new opioids are available. The quality and severity of pain depends on the course of each individual cancer patient because cancer pain has a variety of locations and causes. Mechanism based treatment of cancer pain should be performed on the basis of investigation of the mechanism of cancer pain and neuropathic pain