Subjective pain scale

Most physical therapist have a challenge getting their patients to accurately explain their pain.  Often time it is the location and what makes it worse that is challenging to communicate.  More often though, is the intensity of the pain.  To all consumers of PT, when your therapist asks you how much pain your in, don’t worry about a wrong number, just give your immediate gut instinct.  We just need a level to work off of.  To let us know if our interventions are having a positive affect. 

The common pain scale is the classic 0-10.  10 being, I am about to die and need immediate emergency medicine, and 0 being pain free.  I have begun using this scale to start my care and then asking pts % of improvement after interventions begin.

As a consumer, please be very accurate with your pain descriptions as it will only lead to better care provided for you.

~J

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 15th, 2009 at 6:31 am and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

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