Pain is practically unavoidable during the postoperative period. The control of pain by pharmacological means is not always easy to achieve because of the patient's physical conditions or the anxiety responses (muscular tension, irrational thoughts, fantasies, etc) related to pain. Besides reducing emotional stress, muscular relaxation is an aid to the pharmacological control of pain. The aims of this study were to explore whether learned muscular relaxation is helpul in the pharmacological treatment for diminishing the severity of postoperative pain, and to observe whether this pain is related to the anxiety and depressive symptoms present in patients. Before the selected patients underwent surgery, the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS) was applied to them. After the surgery, pain was evaluated by means of an analog visual scale (AVS), and the patients were assigned to one of two groups. The first group received muscular relaxation training (Schultz's technique), whereas the second received only the usual medical treatment. The evaluation of patients' lasted until they were discharged from the hospital. From 20 patients who entered the study ten of them received the experimental maneuver. There were no significant changes regarding either anxiety or depression. Initial scores on AVS were similar in the two groups, and they decreased in both groups over time. The experimental group showed that pain decreased after relaxation instruction, there was no correlation of pain with either anxiety or depression.

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