Medical Uses
Morphine is primarily used to treat both acute and chronic severe pain. It is also used for pain due to myocardial infarction and for labor pains. There are however concerns that morphine may increase mortality in the setting of non ST elevation myocardial infarction. Morphine has also traditionally been used in the treatment of the acute pulmonary edema. A 2006 review however found little evidence to support this practice. Immediate release morphine is beneficial in reducing the symptom of shortness of breath due to both cancer and non-cancer causes. Its duration of analgesia is about 3–4 hours when administered via the intravenous, subcutaneous, or intramuscular route and 3–6 hours when given by mouth. Morphine is also used in slow release formulations for opiate substitution therapy (OST) in Austria, Bulgaria, and Slovenia, for addicts who cannot tolerate the side effects of using either methadone or buprenorphine, or for addicts who are "not held" by buprenorphine or methadone. It is used for OST in many parts of Europe although on a limited basis.
Read more about this topic: Epimorph
Famous quotes containing the word medical:
“There may perhaps be a new generation of doctors horrified by lacerations, infections, women who have douched with kitchen cleanser. What an irony it would be if fanatics continued to kill and yet it was the apathy and silence of the medical profession that most wounded the ability to provide what is, after all, a medical procedure.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)
“As we speak of poetical beauty, so ought we to speak of mathematical beauty and medical beauty. But we do not do so; and that reason is that we know well what is the object of mathematics, and that it consists in proofs, and what is the object of medicine, and that it consists in healing. But we do not know in what grace consists, which is the object of poetry.”
—Blaise Pascal (1623–1662)