NUMERIC PAIN SCALE SKIN

When patients also use words to talk about their pain and how it affects their daily lives, they can paint a more complete and precise picture for their doctors. The discrepancy shows the problem with doctors relying only on numbers without additional data. The researchers found that about 75 percent of patients who rated their pain between four and seven on the numerical scale, which is a range that usually demands higher medication doses, also said their pain was “tolerable,” which is a word that typically indicates no need for more pain treatment, according to NPR. Patients were asked to rate their pain on a scale of 0 to 10 and were also asked the question, “Is your pain tolerable?” In a recent study, John Markman, MD, director of the Translational Pain Research Program at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry, and colleagues studied data from other studies that asked chronic pain patients to rate their pain using both numbers and words, NPR recently reported. Numerical pain scales focus on pain severity, but they don’t address other aspects of pain, notes Verywell, “such as qualities of pain (sharp, dull, throbbing) or other characteristics of pain (annoying or unbearable).” There are other questionnaires designed for that purpose. “The primary impetus for the development of the scales we use today was to standardize it, not so much for patients to tell us how much pain they have in the clinical setting, but to standardize it from the perspective of being able to study it for research purposes,” John Farrar, MD, PhD, a pain specialist and director of the Biostatistcs Analysis Center at the University of Pennsylvania, said in the Whyy article. Perhaps tellingly, the 0-10 scale wasn’t originally intended to help *treat* a patient’s pain rather, it was created to help researchers study it. This article from Whyy explains how pain scales came to be such a ubiquitous part of the everyday clinical experience at the doctor’s office or hospital. Is your pain improving or getting worse? Using a pain scale can also help you and your doctor analyze which factors - a change in physical activity, say, or a new medication regimen - could be responsible for those changes. But the idea is that they can help compare your own ratings over time. Your version of a seven could be someone else’s idea of a three. Pain scales are based on self-reported data - that means from you, the patient - so they are admittedly subjective. Here, 0 means you have no pain one to three means mild pain four to seven is considered moderate pain eight and above is severe pain. There are many different kinds of pain scales, but a common one is a numerical scale from 0 to 10. What Is a Pain Scale?Ī pain scale is simply a way of rating or quantifying your pain so you can talk about it with your doctor, other health care professionals, or even your friends and family. This echoes a change in thinking among some in the medical community, who say that these pain scales are too simplistic and could lead to patients not getting the most effective treatment for their pain. More than half of poll respondents (59 percent) thought that using a numbering system was not an effective method to measure their pain.

NUMERIC PAIN SCALE SKIN

That’s the question we posed in our July 2018 monthly poll to participants in ArthritisPower®, our patient-centered research registry for joint, bone, and inflammatory skin conditions. Is a 0-10 Pain Scale Really the Best Way to Convey Your Pain?

Numeric pain scale