Treating Abdominal Pain in Children: What Do We Know?

Abdominal pain is a common reason for emergency department visits in the United States. Failure to treat children's pain has long been considered substandard and unethical. Within the emergency department setting, pain has been repeatedly shown to be undertreated. Analgesic medications are suboptimally used for children with abdominal pain because of a wide variety of causes. To our knowledge, there is no standard of care for the treatment of such pain. As such, several recent studies have set out to determine the most appropriate methods to address this gap in knowledge. The proceeding article will attempt to review the literature as it pertains to severe acute abdominal pain, biliary colic, renal colic, and dysmenorrhea.