• One study found that elderly patients who were not verbally communicative of their sample that they examined, only 17% of these non-verbally communicative elderly were receiving pain medications
• When one just glances back to the tables where I show that pain in the elderly, whether they be intact or demented, ranges from 70% to 86%, then it is very hard to reconcile numbers of only 17%
• This is why we believe that pain is not recognized in patients who have difficulty in telling us that they are in pain

Copyright 1999 by the GEC