Pain scales towards an enhancement of the description

Introduction

Pain is, according to the International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP), “an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage, or described in terms of such damage,” and has always been an element with which the physiotherapist interfaces in taking care of the person who has a damage to complex sense-motor structures.

Everyday life and the campaigns promoted for a pain-free health care led us to use the VAS scale to assess and monitor the discomfort. However, it limits the value to a quantitative dimension. Even in the ungraded version with the emoticons (cheerful/ sad) at the extremes of a straight line, there is the same limit, leaving out all other aspects of this important complex factor.

Methods

Mc Gill University’s proposal of a pain scale where many aspects of pain perception are analyzed and valued, makes it possible that our professional figure can approach the patient’s body conscientiously, as well as with the tools of science, respecting it in timing, in space, in pressures and temperature, in discomfort or fear, in tension and emotionality. These are all aspects that can influence a rehabilitative act, where the storytelling accompanies the therapeutic interventions and the exercises performed by the patient. Our aim was to promote the validation of this scale, in fact, after a study of some literature papers, 12 colleagues proposed the scale to 25 patients, aged between 52 to 90 years.

Results

14 of them state that they were more aware of the type of their pain.

From that survey emerged some critical issues:

– The unevenness in the mode of presentation of the scale’s targeted questionnaire

– The presence of two Italian version of the same scale, but none validated

– The approximation of our translations, which were also different.

This made it difficult to submit the test to the patients, who were quite confused by the multitude of shades of the pain sensation (some of them they had never thought before).

Discussion and Conclusion

However, the critical issues described before, the potential of this new tool came out. In fact, the questions certainly helped to increase awareness of the location, intensity, and quality of their pain and the area of the body from which it origin.

The terms used in the questions made the patient’s explication of his condition more complex in some cases, but for most cases they were definitely helpful.

REFERENCES

Melzack R. – The McGill Pain Questionnaire: Major properties and scoring methods. Pain 1975;

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Padovani A., Caratozzolo S. – Il dolore in neurologia: aspetti clinici e valutativi. Focus on brain 2017; 2:55 – 57

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