I have to copy a large amount of medical texting containing references, including the example below. I would like to remove the references from the text which are in brackets e.g. [1], [2], [14,28]. I'd also like to remove the space just before the brackets, otherwise the sentence will have a space before the full stop. Could you please tell me how I could do it? I haven't been able to figure it out using your guides.
Pharmacologic treatment of advanced CKD (eGFR <30 mL/min/1.73 m2) — Our pharmacologic approach is adapted from the World Health Organization (WHO) analgesic ladder, which involves a cautious, stepwise approach to prescribing analgesic agents according to pain severity (figure 1) [31-33]. According to the WHO analgesic ladder, mild pain is treated with nonopioid analgesic agents (tier 1), moderate pain is treated with a weak opioid with or without a nonopioid agent (tier 2), and severe pain is treated with a strong opioid (tier 3) (table 2 and figure 1) [34]. The WHO ladder is modified for patients with CKD since many specific agents (such as codeine and tramadol) should not be used for individuals with a severely reduced estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR) (table 2) [31,35]. Systematic reviews for nonmalignant chronic pain have supported use of the WHO analgesic ladder approach in the general [29,36-43] and geriatric [44] populations. Most palliative care consensus groups with expertise in caring for CKD patients advocate for this approach [14,28,31,33,45-56].
