How to identify and assess pain
Pain is a signal from the central nervous system indicating that something is wrong. Pain is helpful in that it alerts the brain to take action. If we never felt pain, we could be injured or have a serious medical condition without any awareness that our body is in danger. Unfortunately, chronic pain is an entirely different experience. It is often a symptom of a medical condition or has no known cause.
We have all likely experienced pain at some point in our lives. There are a variety of common words to describe pain, such as dull, acute, shooting, burning, sharp, or throbbing. However, people’s understanding of these words and their position on the pain scale can vary wildly. There is no medical way to diagnose a level of pain, so often it hinges on our subjective experience. A larger challenge occurs when trying to describe someone else’s pain. A particularly empathetic doctor might be better able to key into a level of pain, but most will rely on anecdotal descriptions to help them understand.(Pain Scale)
Pain Scales
Often the best way to track pain is to track it over time. Does the pain have an ebb and flow? Is it associated with any specific activities? Has non-specific pain been occurring for a while? Some of the questions that a doctor might ask that you can also pursue with your loved one include:
- How would you describe the pain (burning, stinging, stabbing, throbbing…)?
- Where do you feel the pain, and has it spread?
- Which activities aggravate and relieve the pain?
- Are there times of day when the pain is worse?
- How long have you been experiencing it?
You can also use one of several scales to help your loved one identify levels of pain.
- Numerical Scale: The most commonly used scale, where pain is ranked from 0 (no pain) to 10 (worst possible pain).
- Visual Faces Scale: This format involves showing a number of faces with a range of expressions from distressed to happy to allow them to point at how they are feeling.
- General Pain Assessment: This assessment uses an outline of the human body, front and back, to have them place x’s where pain is located. This can facilitate conversation about whether the pain is linked or non-specific.
- McGill Pain Questionnaire: Doctors may use this official questionnaire, which uses groups of words to describe pain such as “tugging, pulling, wrenching” or “dull, sore, hurting, aching, heavy.” Knowing where your senior hurts, how bad they perceive the pain to be, and how much it’s impacting their daily life is helpful both to aid you in knowing how to assist them, but also as an aggregated set of information to relay to their medical team. Source: Medical News Today and Pain Scale
TIP: Help seniors who are active online to understand that the Web does not have a medical degree. While medical information can be helpful to reference and understand more about health, only professionals with education and training should make diagnoses and prescribe treatments.
John Stewart