Articles: pain-measurement.
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Pain management in acute orthopedic injury needs to be tailored to the presentation and patient. Subjective and objective assessment, in conjunction with pathophysiology, should be used to provide symptom control. Ideally, treatment should be administered in an escalating fashion, attempting to manage pain with the lowest dose of the safest medication available. There are also adjunctive therapies, including those that are nonpharmacologic, that can provide additional relief.
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Patients often tell others about their pain using their own verbal descriptors of pain intensity, but the meaning of this pain language is not universally evident, which could contribute to misinterpretation about pain severity. The study purpose was to discover the intensity values of verbal pain intensity descriptors. The 248 randomly selected inpatients used a visual analogue scale to assign a value to each of 26 pain intensity descriptors. ⋯ Findings contribute estimates for the magnitude of pain represented by each of the 26 descriptors. Clinicians, text data miners, and researchers should consider these values as they interpret the meaning of the descriptors that they hear in daily practice or research settings or that they find in electronic health records, email messages, or social media posts. Despite the wide variability in the magnitude of each descriptor, findings provide insights about the intensity of pain when individuals use verbal pain intensity descriptors in conversations, social media, or clinical encounters.
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We sought to refine a screening measure for discriminating a sensitized or normal sensation pain phenotype among African American adults with sickle cell disease (SCD). ⋯ The PR-Lasso offers a way to discriminate a SCD pain phenotype.
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Microvascular decompression (MVD) is a potentially curative surgery for drug-resistant trigeminal neuralgia (TN). Predictors of pain freedom after MVD are not fully understood. ⋯ Approximately three-quarters of patients with drug-resistant TN achieve pain freedom after MVD. Shorter disease duration, arterial compression, and type 1 Burchiel classification may predict more favorable outcome. These results may improve patient selection and provider expectations.
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Low back pain is a common musculoskeletal condition with substantial individual and societal costs. Standardized self-report questionnaires are commonly used in clinical practice to identify prognostic risk factors and tailor interventions for low back pain. However, most of these low back pain questionnaires have been developed in Western cultures and may not be clinically applicable to other cultures. These cultural aspects have not been explored. This study aimed to investigate the cultural assumptions underlying back pain questionnaires and the potential implications of using standardized questionnaires with non-Western populations. ⋯ Findings suggest that questionnaires could potentially negatively affect the patient-clinician rapport and lead to inaccurate and unanticipated results when used with culturally and linguistically diverse populations. Findings are also likely to be applicable to people with low back pain more broadly, regardless of culture. Implications include a need for cultural sensitivity when using questionnaires, greater consideration of when to use these measures, and adaptations to the use/design of standardized questionnaires.