New Ways to Define Pain

A recent article in The Wall Street Journal highlighted the power of proactive patients. Patients complained about the familiar pain scale of 1 to 10 (remember the smiley and frowny faces?) because they never really knew what a 10 was or exactly what the other numbers meant. The doctors and patients had no way of knowing how each other rated pain either. Did the doctor and patient mean the same thing when they assigned a number to pain? A new system of pain measurement is being developed, related to daily activities. It is thought to be more significant what a patient can and cannot do in daily life, like cooking, getting physical therapy or sleeping, than what number the patient assigns to the pain.

 

What attracted me to the article is that this rethinking arose out of patients talking to doctors, not the reverse. Usually, if patients talk, doctors listen. This is a principle which can be applied to every health care encounter a patient has. Ask questions. Talk to the doc. It can pay big dividends.