ABSTRACT
Pain is one of the most feared symptoms by cancer patients and needs to be considered in its entirety. In order to meet this challenge, palliative care, it prevents and alleviates suffering of patients facing life-threatening illnesses, through early identification, assessment and correct intervention in pain that should be considered from the perspective of the whole being, through four components of total pain: physical, psychic, social and spiritual. To understand this complexity, this research aims to investigate the national and international scientific production about total pain in cancer patients. An integrative literature review was peformed, selecting articles published in Portuguese and English, between 2014 and 2019 in the Scientific Electronic Library Online and Pubmed portal databases, using four combinations of descriptors and booleans, with 21,548 files. After applying the exclusion criteria, 25 articles were selected. Studies in English, quantitative and performed by doctors, prevailed. They pointed that among the symptoms, pain is the most prevalent in cancer disease and the major responsible for influencing patients' quality of life negatively. They pointed out the difficulty of health professionals in diagnosing and treating pain in a multidimensional way, with few instruments and protocols that guide the assessment. The conclusion is that for the identification and effective treatment of pain in palliative care patients, the treatment must be considered in its entirety. For this, it is necessary the qualification of health professionals and the creation of instruments that help them to manage pain in its full expression.
Keywords:
Oncology; palliative care; pain
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