How Do You Use a Pain Scale?

When you have chronic pain, it’s easy to become jaded about using a pain scale. You’re asked to rate your pain every time you see your doctor. You fill out pain questionnaire after pain questionnaire. You are asked to assign words to your pain, again and again. Eventually you may wonder: how is this helping?

Why Use a Pain Scale at All?

The answer: it helps us know what you are feeling. And by “us,” I mean the people around you: your doctor, your nurse, your therapist, your family members and so on.

Pain is subjective. Sure, there are signs of pain that other people can see: grimacing, guarding behaviors (like holding your back, or other unusual postures) and verbalisms (crying, saying “ow”). While these signs tell us you are in pain, they don’t tell us how intense your pain is, or what other effects it has on you. We can’t crawl into your body and experience it for ourselves, so we do the next best thing. We ask you to describe it to us. A pain scale simply gives us a guideline.

How to Use a Pain Scale Effectively

The short answer is this: be honest. Don’t over-inflate or under-rate your pain, because that doesn’t help you or anyone else. The whole idea of using a pain scale is to accurately communicate what you are feeling, not to hide it.

Pain scales come in all shapes and sizes. This list is by no means complete, but here are some of the commonly used pain scales.

• Visual Analogue Scale (VAS)
• Numerical Rating Scale (NRS)
• Verbal Pain Intensity
• Wong-Baker (FACES) Scale
• McGill Pain Questionnaire
• Brief Pain Inventory
• Memorial Assessment Pain Card
• Western Ontario MacMaster (WOMAC)
• Neuropathy Pain Scale
• Descriptor Differential Pain Scale
• The Leeds Assessment of Neuropathic Symptoms and Signs (LANSS)

_Source:

Gould, Harry J III. "Understanding Pain: What it is, Why it Happens, and How It’s Managed" New York: American Academics of Neurology 2007