The nurse is caring for a patient who has been receiving pain medication over the last 24 hours. the patient states that the medication is no longer relieving his pain as it did yesterday. what does the nurse attribute this statement to?

The best answer to the question: What does the nurse attribute this statement to, regarding a patient who tells the nurse that the pain medication he has been receiving for the past 24 hours is no longer working to relieve the pain, would be: tachyphylaxis, or drug tolerance.

Explanation:

Regarding pain medication, especially when it comes to opioid types, which are highly addictive, healthcare professionals must be really careful, especially of the appearance of tolerance, or tachyphylaxis. This term is defined as the decreasing of the body´s response to the therapeutical effects of a medication, after the first dose, and given the successive doses. This means that the person has reached toleration of the dosage being administered and thus the drug is not producing the same therapeutic effect. This happens most commonly in medication that acts on the CNS (central nervous system).