Analgesic administration for pain control in patients with acute abdominal pain, regarding acute appendicitis, is controversial. Despite the results previous studies indicating the safeness of analgesic use in ED for acute abdominal pain, physicians still prefer to postpone their use after performing surgical evaluations. Since many patients admitted to ED are unlikely to receive prompt surgical consultation, many of them need pain relief to prevent unnecessary suffering. On the other hand such pain relief must not interfere with the diagnosis and treatment of patients and do not cause any complications. Morphine is a common and effective analgesic which, if shown to have no effect on correct diagnosis of acute abdomen, can be used for this purpose.~Thus we evaluated morphine effect on pain reduction and diagnostic accuracy in patients admitted to ED with the diagnosis of acute appendicitis.
The purpose of the study is to evaluate morphine effect on pain reduction and diagnostic accuracy in patients admitted to emergency ward with the diagnosis of acute appendicitis.