Anaesthesia Service

What is pain?

Pain is defined as an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience, with actual or potential tissue damage. Also, as a dysphoric and disagreeable sensation.

Pain commonly occurs as a warning signal to detect an injury or illness in our body. This alarm signal activates a series of mechanisms whose objective is to avoid or limit the damage. For this, the body has the following elements:

Pain signal detectors: they are called nociceptors and are formed by specialized “neurons” in the reception of pain.
Ultrafast protection mechanisms: reflections. They are rapid actions, generated at the level of the spinal cord (spine) that produce a withdrawal action of the stimulus that produces pain.
General warning mechanisms: stress. They are activated from the alert centers present in the brain; this translates into increased surveillance and cardiovascular, respiratory and hormonal responses.

Nowadays, it is inconceivable that there are untreated persistent pain states, causing distress to patients, and suffering to their relatives.

Specialists and general practitioners, in light of a painful syndrome, should avoid monopolization, make an early acknowledge and refer the patients for their early diagnosis, treatment and subsequent follow-up, to specific multidisciplinary Pain Units.

The Pain Unit of Magna Clinic

The Pain Unit of Magna Clinic is a multidisciplinary and a First Peripheral Level Therapeutic Unit.

In this task are involved different specialists such as: neurosurgeons, traumatologists, rehabilitators, physiotherapists, rheumatologists, oncologists, psychologists, psychiatrists and family doctors. We collaborate between all specialities so that we can provide all knowledge and therapies available to contribute to pain relief.

This corresponds to the requirements of the, in Spanish, “CASED” (Accreditation Committee of the Spanish Society of Pain), which guarantees a diagnosis and treatment of the pain by following a series of guidelines and standards, both institutionally and individually.

How to treat it?

In the Pain Unit, acute pains, not operable chronic lumbar and cervical pain syndromes, postoperative lumbar pain or postlaminectomy syndrome, radiculopathies, peripheral neuralgia, post-herpetic painful syndromes, neuropathic pain, (diabetes metabolic origin, etc.), myofascial, posttraumatological syndromes, headaches and cephagias, optimization and follow-up of oncological pains, pelvic-perineal pains, sympathetic dystrophic reflex syndromes, rheumatic arthritis-rheumatic syndromes in general… are diagnosed and treated in a methodical and protocolized way. In collaboration with the Oncology service, our Pain Unit also treats oncological pain.

The treatment can be pharmacological conservative, which consists in the optimization and dosage of the appropriate analgesic drugs, in a staggered manner, or, where appropriate, in interventional techniques such as peripheral infiltrations, neural blocks, epidurals, neural radiofrequency and facet radiofrequency techniques, epidurolysis or implantation of neurostimulators or continuous infusion pumps of drugs.