Beyond The 1-10 Pain Scale

How bad does it hurt? I’m willing to go out on a limb and say that this is, quite possibly, the most common question we ask in EMS. And it can be a difficult question to answer. How bad compared to what? How do we reconcile the patient with significant pain who winces and says it only hurts a little. Or what about the patient who is relaxed and seemingly comfortable while reporting the worst pain they have ever felt? Not everyone feels pain the same way. Some patients feel pain more than others. And, perhaps even more significant, some patients fear pain more than others. What’s a clinician to do? You and I aren’t the first ones to wrestle with this question. Medicine has devised a multitude of way to ask patients how much pain they are experiencing. We’ve even gone lengths to try to assess which ones are comparatively more accurate. From numeric rating scales to verbal rating scales to visual analogue scales. (No, I didn’t make that up.) If you prefer to know who’s scale you’re using you can try the Wong-Baker faces scale, the McGill scale or even the Walid-Robinson pain index. (The patient needs to be taking opiates to use that last one.) The truth is, we may just be wasting or time trying to develop more sophisticated and accurate ways of asking this question. With rare exceptions, prehospital folk tend to use the standard numeric rating scale, A.K.A. the 1-10 scale. It’s simple, it’s relatively fast and it doesn’t require us to carry a...
Source: The EMT Spot - Category: Emergency Medicine Authors: Tags: EMT Source Type: blogs