A pain rating scale is a tool to quantify the patient’s subjective experience of pain. Pain is a subjective experience and the most reliable measure comes from the person’s self report of pain. In alert patients, the patient may be asked to locate their pain on a scale of 0 to 10 with 0 being no pain at all and 10 the worst pain they have ever felt. For children a pain scale with a series of faces going from a happy face (no pain) to a crying face (worst pain) is used. Pain scales are most useful for assessing trends in a patient’s pain over time and in relationship to events such as the administration of pain medication or exercise.
Pain
Pain is your body telling you that you have hurt it. This is a good thing, important when you are injured. It can also help diagnose problems with your body. Sometimes pain continues long after it's necessary. Amputees report phantom pain in the legs or arms they no longer have.
There are different kinds of pain, and describing the type is useful in diagnosis: recurring, constant, steady, knife-like, radiating, sharp, dull. Medicines that dull pain are analgesics. Those that kill all feeling are anesthetics.
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HCA Houston Healthcare Conroe answeredSee All 5 AnswersChest pain can feel like pressure, stabbing, burning or squeezing. The many different body systems which cause chest pain are: heart, lungs, stomach/gall bladder, musculoskeletal/nervous systems (bones/muscles/nerves). Providing your physician details about quality (pressure/stabbing/burning/squeezing), timing and duration (with activity, at rest, after food, related to position, lasting seconds/minutes/hours/days), and associated symptoms (nausea, shortness of breath, arm/shoulder pain) will help determine which body systems are more likely to be causing the chest pain. -
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A few unfortunate individuals have a congenital absence of pain sensation. They do not fare well due to repeated bodily insults that go unnoticed. People with an acquired deficiency in the pain sensation (e.g., diabetic neuropathy or neurosyphilis) can develop a severe destructive arthritis -- a result of repeated minor joint injuries that are overlooked. -
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Aurora Health Care answeredThere are two types of breast pain:- Cyclical breast pain is the most common type of breast pain and usually occurs before a woman's period. It may be related to hormone changes during the menstrual cycle. It is described as a dull, heavy, or aching pain that may extend into the underarm. The breast may feel tender, sore, and swollen.
- Noncyclical breast pain is usually described as burning, aching, or sore pain. This type of breast pain most often occurs in only one breast and tends to be in one specific area (localized). Less commonly, the pain may occur in both breasts and extend into the underarm area.
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Aurora Health Care answeredBreast pain is a common problem that affects women of all ages. It may affect a woman at regular intervals or it may be less predictable. Breast pain causes worry and is uncomfortable, but it rarely is a sign of a serious problem. Mastalgia is the medical term for breast pain.
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Dr. Michael Roizen, MD , Internal Medicine, answeredSee All 2 AnswersWhen you first start exercising, you may feel one kind of pain - a slow, burning ache in the muscles that is normal and not a cause for concern. This "normal" burning indicates you are reaching your anaerobic threshold, meaning you're at the limit of your endurance. The pain is believed to result from the buildup of lactic acid in your muscles, which occurs when your muscles are not getting enough oxygen (anaerobic means "in the absence of oxygen"). This burning is not an indication of an injury but that you're reaching your fitness limit. (Some world-class athletes and professional athletes believe that a massage - after stretching - removes the lactic acid from their muscles before their muscles have cooled down and lets them achieve peak performance again the next day.) The more you work out, the higher your anaerobic threshold (limit of endurance) will go, and soon you will be able to work out for longer periods and at a more vigorous rate.
Feeling sore after a workout does not mean that anything is necessarily wrong, especially if it occurs the next day. Unless you've actually sustained an injury, the pain will probably go away within a day or two, eventually producing lean muscle in place of flab. That's why you should space your workouts and rotate your activities, so that different muscle groups get worked on different days, getting a day off in between. -
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It is a common misconception to view the nervous system as being "hard-wired;" that is, stimulation of a nerve ending (say a needle prick) always produces the same behavioral and affective response. This concept implies that the same intensity of pain stimulus will always elicit the same degree of nerve stimulation and hence the same subjective experience of pain. It is now understood that the concept is wrong.
Researchers have proposed that pain is a complex integration of noxious stimuli, affective traits and cognitive factors. In other words, the emotional aspects of having a chronic pain state and one's rationalization of the problem may both influence the final experience of pain. The first experimental evidence that the nervous system was not hard-wired was presented in 1965. They noted that a repetitive stimulation of a peripheral nerve, at sufficient intensity to activate C-fibers, resulted in a progressive build-up of the amplitude of the electrical response recorded in the second order dorsal horn neurons. If the system had been hard-wired, each stimulus would have elicited the same response in the second order neuron. They termed this phenomenon "wind-up." It is now appreciated that the phenomenon of wind-up is crucial to understanding the problem of chronic pain via the mechanism of "central sensitization." -
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Scripps Health answeredWhen muscle and joint pain arises, some parents will give their kids anti-inflammatory medications before practices or games so they don’t miss any playing time. The problem is, these medications only block the chemical process that produces inflammatory pain, so continuing the activity simply puts more stress on the already-injured tissue. By masking important symptoms, kids run the risk of experiencing more extensive injuries and more time away from the action. Ice is preferable to anti-inflammatories as a first-line treatment for pain after injury or activity. -
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RealAge answeredA pain management specialist is a doctor who has completed training in the evaluation, diagnosis and treatment of different types of pain, including acute pain, chronic pain, pain due to injury or surgery, pain related to cancer or other diseases and pain without any obvious cause.
Pain management specialists can treat your pain directly by prescribing medication and possibly performing pain-relieving procedures. They may also coordinate your rehabilitative care. In some cases, pain management specialists may oversee and direct an interactive, multidisciplinary team of experts who are skilled and trained to help people suffering from pain. These medical experts may include psychologists, nurses, physician assistants, physical therapists, occupational therapists, recreational therapists, nutritionists and social workers. A person's loved ones, including family friends, may also be brought onto the interdisciplinary pain management "team" to help the person manage pain while living as normal a life as possible every day. -
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Dr. David A. Hanscom, MD , Spine Surgery, answeredSee All 2 AnswersPhantom limb pain occurs in patients who require an amputation, often because blood supply to the limb has been compromised by vascular disease. Common causes are diabetes or atherosclerosis, when there’s not enough blood to sustain a limb’s viability. Prior to the amputation, lack of oxygen causes the limb to become very painful. After the limb is removed, up to 60% of patients feel the pain as though the limb were still there. Almost 40% of sufferers characterize the pain as anywhere from distressing to even more severe than before.