Children feel pain in the same way as adults and for the same reasons such as injury, illness and medical procedures. The big difference is how kids can express their pain. The following is a useful tool to help understand how your child is feeling. You and your pharmacist can then take the most appropriate steps to give them fast, effective relief.

When you need to relieve distressing pain for a child, it's important to provide fast, effective relief immediately. You want to ease their short term suffering and avoid ongoing effects like 'pain memory'.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has established clear guidelines (known as the Analgesic Ladder) which can be used as a guide to help you choose the right pain medicine. If your child does not experience pain relief on Step One of the Analgesic Ladder, they should progress to the next step as outlined below.

World Health Organization Analgesic Ladder

As you can see, the WHO recommends using combination medicines such as PAINSTOP DAY-TIME to relieve moderate to strong pain.
The reasons are simple. All analgesics have a ‘ceiling' where giving larger doses or more frequent doses will not provide any further relief. Instead this may well cause harm.

In those situations, a combination analgesic medicine like PAINSTOP DAY-TIME can provide more effective relief.

Dental conditions	Acute earache
Headaches	Minor burns
Fractures	Post-operative pain
Soft tissue injury

PAINSTOP NIGHT-TIME can be used when mild sedation is considered beneficial.

Pain Memory

If pain goes untreated for too long, a condition called 'pain memory' can develop. This is where the nervous system becomes permanently sensitized to the pain signals. This can lead to extreme or exaggerated responses to pain in the future, and normal doses of pain relief medicine may no longer be effective. In the worst cases, a child may even feel pain that isn't really there.

For example, some people who've suffered a lot of pain at the dentist when they were younger may feel their teeth aching just before sitting in the dentist's chair as an adult even though the pain doesn't really exist. This can be regarded as 'pain memory'.