EURASIA REVIEW
Health professionals commonly say, “Don’t look and it won’t hurt” before administering an injection, but is there any scientific basis for the advice? A group of German investigators has found that, in fact, your past experience with needle pricks, along with information you receive before an injection, shape your pain experience. Their research is published in the May issue of PAIN.
“Throughout our lives, we repeatedly experience that needles cause pain when pricking our skin, but situational expectations, like information given by the clinician prior to an injection, may also influence how viewing needle pricks affects pain,” says lead author Marion Höfle, a doctoral student in the research Multisensory Integration group led by Dr. Daniel Senkowski, at the Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin and the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf.
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