VOCABULARY when compared to what it feels like.

Here are a few useful sites to check out about your pain from a personal point of view and how medical types 'frame' our pain as well.

www.rsdhope.org
http://painconsortium.nih.gov/pain_s...FORT_Scale.pdf
http://painconsortium.nih.gov/pain_s...atingScale.pdf
http://www.cityofhope.org/prc/pdf/Pa...20Colorado.pdf
http://www.virginia.edu/uvaprint/HSC/pdf/020210.pdf
http://www.cityofhope.org/prc/pain_assessment.asp

And lastly my favorite:
http://shsskip.swan.ac.uk/Informatio...in%20Scale.htm

I hope these help you speak more clearly to your doctors when describing your pain[s].

GOOD FEELINGS! for all! - j

According to that last one my pain level is a 7 sound about right. Thanks for the links.

It does help you keep it all in 'perspective' doesn't it?

To me it seems as if DOCS want US to use the rite words...BUT does that mean we have to create the better words for the situation? When we really don't care about 'words' cause we plain old hurt too much?

We all, patients and docs aren't using the same VOCABULARY to describe the pain and damage it causes in/to our lives.. At the same time, words are what make us HUMAN and we should be able to come up with stuff far better than what's in the NIH data-bank as of now... There are soo many different dimensions to pain, the sources, the results that it scares me there is not ONE distinct set of words that spell TROUBLE! in any given set of issues or diagnois protocol. [here I must state I'm am a professional patient, NOT a doc!] Believe me, I am googleing my search engine to death trying to find out real, valid, objective means of assessing something as SUBJECTIVE as PAIN!

BTW I've been humming along at about a 7 myself for quite a while... but, don't forget [a useful comment in the Mankowski stuff point it out] that docs automatically DISCOUNT 2 points of what you say to reality. I just tell them ...IF my pain were to disappear tomorrow...I would NOT know what is normal!
I also compare current pain to a incident where I'd had a 'few fractured ribs', bruises the size of Idaho [looked like it at least], and a concussion as a 'walk in the park' compared to the current and ongoing...
So, does that make my current 'common' 7 automatically a 5 or am I merely 'getting used to it'? I dunno, don't care. We can and DO live with it...
HUGS to all!

Hugs to all, pray and hope for BILLYE! - j

I like the last one as well. My pain is a 7 at it's worst. Or was until just recently and now it's back for a while. At least I hope it's only for awhile. And not as badly as it was. But just as annoying cause I went from being almost totally pain free to suddenly having pain again.