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Asked by feet520rhos on 17 Feb 2025.
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Sandra Robertson answered on 17 Feb 2025:
I’m a little unsure what you mean by your question, but doctors do not setout to cause more pain. Sometimes it is not possible to find out what the problem is without touching your body to see exactly where the problem is, and this could be painful. If the problem which is making you unwell can only be fixed by treatment like an operation, you might be in more pain after the operation, before your body heals and you feel better.
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Comments
melissau commented on :
It’s possible that something which a doctor does can cause some pain, such as a brief pain for an injection but generally if a doctor needs to do something which they know is going to be painful, they will use some pain relieving medicine – for example, if they needed to stitch up a deep wound in your skin, they would use a local anaesthetic around the wound so that you wouldn’t feel it when they did the stiches – or for example, they might give you a drug which makes you very sleepy for a few minutes so that you’re not aware of the pain. As a vet we use similar drugs and procedures for doing things which might cause short term pain for our animal patients – it’s particularly tricky because, unlike a person, we can’t explain to them beforehand what we’re going to do, so we have to be especially careful to avoid causing them pain wherever possible as this will likely make them frightened.
melissau commented on :
If we have to do surgery on an animal, in the same way as a doctor does, we give pain medicines to minimise the pain the animal feels both during the operation and other pain medicines which will continue after the operation while they are recovering.