Pain measurement: Measuring an experience is like holding water
Measurement in pain is complicated. Firstly it’s an experience, so inherently subjective – how do we measure “taste”, for example? Or “joy”? Secondly, there’s so much riding on its measurement: how much pain relief a person gets, whether a treatment has been successful, whether a person is thought sick enough to be excused from working, whether a person even gets treatment at all…
And even more than these, given it’s so important and we have to use surrogate ways to measure the unmeasurable, we have the language of assessment. In physiotherapy practice, what the person says is called “subjective” while the measurements the clinician takes are called “objective” – as if, by them being conducted by a clinician and by using instruments, they’re not biased or “not influenced by personal feelings or opinions in considering and representing facts”. Subjective, in this instance, is defined by Merriam Webster as “ relating to the way a person experiences things in his or her own mind. : based on feelings or opinions rather than facts.” Of course, we know that variability exists between clinicians even when carrying out seemingly “objective” tests of, for example, range of movement, muscle strength, or interpreting radiological images or even conducting a Timed Up and Go test (take a look here at a very good review of this common functional test – click...
Source: HealthSkills Weblog - Category: Anesthesiology Authors: adiemusfree Tags: Assessment Chronic pain Clinical reasoning Research Source Type: blogs
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