‘Breakthrough Cancer Pain: What Role can the General Practitioner Play?’ Brief Review

While this article has an area of focus of great relevance to me, their research methods did not exactly yield results that were of great use to me. The study largely focused on the role of the general practitioner as a conductor, rather than a person to bond with, and as such analyzed the general practitioner’s use as a more consistent means of check-up.

However, the final conclusions drawn are of some amount of relevance. The explicit request for the ‘active participation of general practitioners’ is a conclusion that will likely be drawn in a multitude of other studies. The reasoning, however, is to reduce the time lag between the onset of pain and the start of analgesic therapy, and is not similar to what I would expect other studies to yield.

This paper did yield a multitude of other papers to pursue, however, a multicentre Italian study of breakthrough pain performed in different settings, the Italian pain network retrospective study, and Breakthrough Cancer Pain: Preliminary Data of The Italian Oncologic Pain Multisetting Multicentric Survey, amongst a few others.