 Hi guys and welcome back to my latest video today. I wanted to do a video on non-pharmacological pain management things that you can do for your patients that are in addition to or maybe just solely what you're using for a patient. When you're not giving them pain medications or maybe just like in addition to like I said, pain medications. So these are all non-pharmacological measures. Some may work for your patients, some may not. Some hospitals may have certain policies on certain things or may not offer certain things. But these are all good things that you can do as nurses because as we know pain is physical but it's also mental. And so if you can kind of help someone perceive their pain differently or in a new manner then these things may help. Now some of these may help, some of these may not help. Just going to give you some general ideas. I've got a lot of them written on my phone so I'm just going to kind of be looking down here because I want to get through all of them. But my first thing that I wrote down, these are in no particular order is heat or ice or a hot washcloth or a cold washcloth. A lot of times if I have a patient that's nauseous I'll offer a cold washcloth for their head. Sometimes a heating pack or an ice pack, you just have to be very careful when using these that the temperatures are not too hot or too cold to where your patient can't sense it or could actually cause further damage. But it works really well for things like if they've got maybe a backache or maybe they have a headache and they want to put something on their head. Again, some hospitals are very specific about using heat or using cold because they've had instances where these things have actually caused damage to patients. So just make sure that you're following your hospital's policy or look into that before you just like get boiling water and dump it on a washcloth and put it on your patient. The next non-pharmacological pain med, med, oh my gosh, I just pain med, pain measure that I wrote down is distraction. So this can come in many forms, whether maybe you're talking to a patient or they have family members there, you're giving them a book to read music, TV on, lights on, just anything that can distract you from the pain that you're having. Now this doesn't really work for everyone. If you're in like 10 out of 10 pain, most of the time you don't want to be talked to, you don't want to watch TV. But for some people this may actually be enough to kind of not give them any pain medications or just be a good addition to the pain medication they've received. The next measure is exercise or movement or position change. Sometimes just something as simple as putting a pillow somewhere can really help with someone's pain. So elevating their extremities, maybe turning them, putting a pillow behind their back, putting a pillow between their knees, or for some people especially like your orthopedic people that are able to start mobilizing and getting up is getting them up out of bed, getting them moving, of course making sure you're like operating and working within your orders and what they actually are allowed to do and their capabilities. But just movement in general is so good for patients. I have so many patients or seen so many nurses that they say oh my patients in pain well they can't get up. Well treat their pain and then help them get up and move around because that is really ultimately what's going to help treat their pain in the end is just that movement and getting up. Movement helps us so many different things. We could just like talk about movement all day long but even on your patients that can't move much and move doing passive range of motion on them and moving their extremities for them may help maybe a good distraction and it's just good for that early mobility of patients who are not able to walk maybe or are down for now but eventually should be able to walk or move or whatever. So those are some of my different non-pharmacological, I don't know what that is so hard to say, non-pharmacological pain measures that I've written down. There's so many different things you can do and as nurses a lot of what we do for patients pain besides just give medications is this therapeutic sense of touch, sense of talk, sense of just being available and caring to our patients so that they feel that comfort which can in turn help with their pain. Again these things may not work for everyone some may work for some patients that may work for others some may not so use your best discretion and make sure you're being safe about doing all these things. So if you guys enjoyed this video make sure you give it a thumbs up if you have any other great different things that you've tried as nurses or seen leave them down below and I will see you guys in my next video. Bye!