January 18, 2011
Have you ever been asked, ‘On a scale of 1 to 10, where 10 is the most, how bad is your pain?’ I’ve been asked that question. I have heard others be asked that question. I have even seen it in prime time shows. Is it just me, or is that a hard question to answer?
I took a quick look online to see what kind of research there might be about ‘taling about pain.’ I found very little published research. There is research about pediatric pain and getting kids to use pictures of faces to tell about their pain. Then I found an article about developing a measure of neuropathic pain [http://www.meduniwien.ac.at/phd-iai/fileadmin/ISMED/Literaturhinweise/Bennett_LANSS_Pain_2001_92.pdf]. It has the kind of things that I would imagine being more helpful both for making treatment recommendations and to help a patient be able to answer. It asks whether the pain feels like pin pricks, for example. A doctor takes all of the patient’s answers to add up for a total pain score. This seems to be a good way to talk about pain when working to manage it…
Yes, this is exactly how we requested a patient describe their pain during my work in a Cardiac Intensive Care Unit. On a scale from 1-10, with 10 be the worst pain you’ve ever had, what is it? We also asked them to describe the pain for us. Usually in reference to chest pain, it would be described as a heavy weight, tightness, squeezing…etc. It always threw patients off, because it was so dependent on their past life experiences/perceptions with pain. I think this would be a very difficult area to research, because it is so subjective.