What’s the best way of judging pain levels?
There are various scales that can be used to put the pain into some form of perspective. The McGill Pain Questionnaire (MPQ) has both sensory descriptors – like burning, shooting and aching – and affective ones – like tiring, sickening and vicious. The visual analogue scale (VAS) is a 10cm line with anchor points of 0 = no pain at one end and 100 = worst pain possible. But these tend to be used more as research tools. Scales that tend to be more useful in clinical practice include the verbal rating scale (VRS) – mild, moderate, severe. A numerical rating scale typically uses the range 0 to 10 – where 10 is ‘worst pain possible’. Pain behaviour can also be observed. This is a complex area as there may be reasons for the behaviour not being in keeping with what would be expected for any given medical condition.
