What Is Buzzy?
Buzzy is a very cute vibrating bee with ice pack wings that decreases sharp pain when placed upstream. Buzzy®uses natural pain relief by confusing your body's own nerves, thereby dulling or eliminating sharp pain. In the same way that rubbing a bumped elbow helps stop the hurt, or cool running water soothes a burn, Buzzy® bypasses sharp pain.
In an emergency department, nurses and doctors can get too busy to wait for numbing creams for needle procedures. For newly diagnosed diabetic children, the medical community has a history of expecting kids to just get used to needle pain. For shots, for bee stings, for boo-boos, for injected medicines, for all acute pain management, Dr. Amy Baxter and her team developed Buzzy® to put instant pain management in YOUR hands.
What Are Bee Stractors?
Bee-Stractors are 5 cards on a ring with related counting and finding questions on the back. How many stars do you see? Which two cows are the same? Beestractors are a quick and handy way for nurses, teachers, doctors or parents to take the mind off a painful procedure. Distraction can decrease pain by 50%, but having the tools close at hand right when you need them can be tough.
Bee-stractors are quick boredom busters, pain relievers, or tantrum tamers that de-rail downward spirals of distress. The cards can be placed in a slot in Buzzy® to block the view of the needle or they can be held by the child, which ever works best for you.
How to use Buzzy® for Injections
Pain relief for immunizations, particularly multiple shots, requires a slightly different technique than needle pain relief for IV's. When there is no risk of vasoconstriction, pain control is maximized by cooling the area then moving just proximal during the shot.
Ideally, a parent would put an arm around their child and hold Buzzy® on the site for about 30 seconds before the injection. Even with Buzzy® there will be dull touch sensations (those are transmitted on different nerves that Buzzy® doesn't block) so use distraction questions or Bee-Stractor Emergency Entertainment cards to entertain and pull attention away if the child already has a needle phobia. After 30 seconds move Buzzy® up from the injection spot about an inch, keep pressing Buzzy® onto the skin and perform the injection.
For Kids
Kids do best if they're underpromised and Buzzy then over-performs. Let her play and experiment with Buzzy to get used to the sensations before using it for injections and reserve the distraction cards for when she gets her first injection with it. You can also have her rate her pain on a faces scale with injections now, experimenting with things like taking a cold drink of something sweet while getting the injection, or taking a cold drink of water, etc. You can also let her try taking a sweet mystery drink right when you give the injection and trying to guess what it is as a distraction. Then when she gets Buzzy, she'll be used to both distracting herself a little from the process, and she'll know that various techniques work better or not so she'll appreciate how much Buzzy helps.