Fortnightly review: Treating acute pain in hospital

In treating acute pain, tradition and ill informed prejudice sometimes hold sway over evidence and common sense.In this review we concentrate on simple, clinically appropriate, and evidence based treatments. MethodsWhenever possible we based our recommendations on systematic reviews of randomised trials.A citation database of systematic reviews of pain relief can be found at http://www.jr2.ox.ac.uk/Bandolier/painres/MApain.html. 1 We chose reviews for their relevance and quality.Poor quality reviews are significantly more likely to make positive conclusions. 1We collected over 12 000 randomised trials of analgesic interventions from 1950 onwards 2 ; these are available on the Cochrane database.We used trials from this database when there was no relevant systematic review.