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Wound Care Treatment For Burn Patients

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Wound care treatment for burn patients is a painful experience where pain relief options are limited or otherwise too expensive and dangerous such as general anaesthesia (Patterson & Ptacek, 1997). Burn patients are given opioid-based drugs like morphine to manage their pain but this rarely eradicates the pain completely and some patients may find these drugs have little effect at all (Hoffman et al., 2004; Patterson, Hoffman, Palacios, & Jensen, 2006; Patterson & Ptacek, 1997). Burn patients undergoing wound care treatment experience increased pain in the early stages of recovery; more so than the initial incident of being burned. (Harandi, Esfandani, & Shakibaei, 2004; Patterson & Ptacek, 1997). Burn patients not only experience physical trauma but psychological trauma as well; as such, these factors can have an adverse effect on the patients’ recovery (Harandi et al., 2004). To provide additional pain relief and expedite recovery, several studies have been conducted to explore adjunctive pain relief methods that can be used frequently with minimum cost and risk. Rapid Induction Analgesia (RIA) and Virtual Reality Treatment (VRT) are two types of adjunctive treatments that researchers have investigated for managing burn patient pain (Patterson et al., 2006). Therefore, the current study investigated if a combination of RIA and VRT will produce a greater analgesic effect than VRT alone; and, to also determine if the environment in VRT has any effect on pain relief. So

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