Therapeutic Use
Doctors often administer sedatives to patients in order to dull the patient's anxiety related to painful or anxiety-provoking procedures. Although sedatives do not relieve pain in themselves, they can be a useful adjunct to analgesics in preparing patients for surgery, and are commonly given to patients before they are anaesthetized, or before other highly uncomfortable and invasive procedures like cardiac catheterization, colonoscopy or MRI. They increase tractability and compliance of children or troublesome or demanding patients.
Patients in intensive care units are almost always sedated (unless they are unconscious from their condition anyway).
Read more about this topic: Sedative
Famous quotes containing the word therapeutic:
“As a science of the unconscious it is a therapeutic method, in the grand style, a method overarching the individual case. Call this, if you choose, a poet’s utopia.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)