This is a frequent gripe we hear in pain medicine. Why do we have to rate our pain each time we come into the office?
Comedians like Brian Regan have written sketches about pain scales and rating your pain.
“How would you rate your pain?”
“Four stars. Two enthusiastic thumbs up.”
Pain scales allow your medical practitioners to track your pain over time as well as tell us the intensity of the pain you are currently experiencing. Yes, pain is subjective, and your level 4 pain may be someone else’s level 8 pain on a scale of 1 – 10. Someone who has dealt with pain for many years and built-up tolerance may perceive pain much differently than someone who is new to the pain realm. But tracked over time the data from both can still give insight into each patient’s pain.
Given the fact that most pain cannot be seen, pain scales become a vital part of communicating with your practitioner that something is wrong. There are a great many different pain scales out there. Pain can be quantified numerically with the 1-10 scale. It can also be rated using faces spanning the spectrum of happy to extremely sad. Colors have also been used, beginning with blues and greens, and migrating to yellows and ultimately dark red to denote extreme pain. And although pain is no laughing matter, humor can also be used to rate pain such as the following scale.
- Really more of an itch
- Probably just need a Band-Aid®
- Well, you have my attention
- Ouch! But I can still work
- Multiple bee stings
- Swarm of stinging killer bees
- The tears keep falling like Niagara Falls
- Pain so bad I can’t move
- Mauled by either a wolverine or grizzly bear
- Death is at the doorstep
Regardless of the scale your practitioner uses to monitor pain, please, to the best of your ability, answer truthfully and regularly, to assist your medical team in tracking and treating your pain effectively.