Measuring pain intensity

Abstract

Pain intensity is the magnitude or severity of perceived pain. It is the pain domain most often measured in the clinical setting because it is usually the primary target of pain treatment. Although it is possible to ask patients to rate their current pain intensity, clinicians (and patients) are usually more interested in treating the patient’s “usual” or average pain. However, when patients are asked to estimate their average pain intensity over a specified period of time (say, the last week), different patients use different strategies for computing an average score [6]. For example, some might attempt to take into account the entire time period — including those times when they might have experienced no pain — when computing an average. Others might compute an average by taking into account only those times when they felt pain. Thus, two patients with the same experience might provide two different ‘average’ pain scores. This means that one person’s average pain score is not easily comparable to another’s. Also, when patients are asked to rate their average pain in the past week, there is a tendency for them to over-estimate this pain by about 10%, relative to an average score made up of multiple ratings of current pain obtained over that same week. This tendency to overestimate past pain has not been observed for recall ratings of average pain in the past day, however.