Effect of Spiritual Care on Pain of Breast Cancer Patients: A Clinical Trial

Background: One of the most important symptoms and complications of breast cancer is pain with an extensive impact on life dimensions, management of which requires comprehensive nursing care and interventions. Given that spiritual care is an essential and unique part of care and spirituality is an indispensable part of man's life, we aimed to determine the effect of spiritual care in breast cancer patients from a multidimensional viewpoint

Methods: This clinical trial was conducted on breast cancer patients who presented to two medical centers at Isfahan, Iran, during 2014. Fifty patients were randomly selected and assigned to intervention and control groups. For the intervention group, the spiritual care program was implemented in groups of five in ten 60-minute long sessions. Both groups completed the Multidimensional Pain Inventory (MPI), which is a self-report questionnaire, immediately before and six weeks after the intervention. To analyze the data, descriptive statistics, analysis of covariance, and Chi-squared test were performed in SPSS, version 18.

Results: After administering the spiritual care program in the intervention group, the mean scores of pain severity dimensions (P=0.004), disrupted daily activity (P<0.001), emotional disturbance (P<0.001), and negative reaction (P<0.001) decreased significantly. Analysis of covariance indicated significant differences between the intervention and control groups in terms of pain severity (P<0.012), disrupted daily activity (P<0.001), life control (P=0.021), emotional distress (P<0.001), and negative reaction (P=0.004).

Conclusion: Spiritual care is effective on the reduction of pain severity and its adverse effects on the lives of breast cancer patients. Therefore, it is suggested to be used as a non-pharmaceutical complementary treatment for pain relief.