Complementary and Alternative Medicine for Pain Management in Adolescents to Prevent Opioid Dependency: An Integrative Literature Review

Background: Pain medications like opioids are beneficial for treating serious, painful medical conditions like surgeries or cancers, but abuse of these medications can occur with lethal side effects. There is a significant opioid epidemic on the rise in the United States because of over-prescription and abuse. Objectives: To identify complementary and alternative medicine to opioid pain medication prescriptions in order to determine if these alternative and non-pharmacological pain management practices can decrease the risk of opioid addiction in children and adolescents who are coping with pain. Methods: An integrative literature review was conducted. The keywords children, adolescents, pain management, complementary and alternative, therapies, non-pharmacological, effectiveness, pediatric, and opioid were used to search for literature in four databases – CINAHL Complete, PubMed, PsycINFO, and UpToDate. Ten articles between 2006 and 2017 were selected for review. Results: Four recurring methods of complementary and alternative medicine to decrease pain in children and adolescents were found. These include distraction, yoga, spiritual relaxation, and Chinese and herbal medicine. Distraction is broken down into several categories including active and passive distraction, music, guided imagery, and hypnosis. Acupuncture was found to decrease the use of pain medication administration. Conclusions: This literature review identified four major methods of complementary and alternative medicine used to alleviate pain in children and adolescents. These four methods include distraction, yoga, spiritual relaxation, and Chinese and herbal medicine. This research can be used to further study nonpharmacological pain methods to manage pain in order to decrease the amount of opioids prescribed to children and adolescents and prevent dependency on these medications later in life. Keywords: children, adolescents, pain management, complementary and alternative, therapies, opioi