Putting a number on pain
 

How do you all put number on pain when going to doctor? Also when talking to friends? For example, most people would not describe the feeling of mosquito bite as a 10,but what if it felt like bugs were on your legs all the time. To me that is close to moderate to severe.

I usually split the difference and write 5 on the paper.

Hi Januarybabe
 

Yes I sure do put a number on pain. I do that in writing for each doctor I visit. I have several conditions that contribute to pain. The pain specialist I know apprecates this, and I do it daily on a calander, then bring the calander with me to the visit. Hope you are OK,:) ginnie

I was thinking about the paperwork when I go to doctor. They have you list pain from 1 to 10. I will admit my pain is not severe. It is just there is a cumulative affect. A jab here, a pin prick there.

Some of these might help-
http://www.tipna.org/info/documents/...ePainScale.htm
http://www.healthcentral.com/chronic...-403768-5.html
http://www.medicinenet.com/script/ma...ticlekey=21276

On pain numbers
 

Thats fine, just like you stated. It is accumulitive in nature. I have the same kind of thing, I hurt in several locations, and it is differnet in both locations. Give the numbers for each, when they occur, and if anything makes it worse etc. He will appreciate that. ginnie

A similar thread came up a while back....
http://neurotalk.psychcentral.com/sh...d.php?t=139098
I'm sure there are others via the search facility/tool.

I've had many discussions with doctors about this subject over the years, because when they tell me that 10 represents the "worst pain imaginable", I usually come back with, "OK, but I've got a VERY vivid imagination!" (From seeing a lot of "R" rated movies, if you catch my drift...)

Several people (including some doctors) have tried to objectify the scale by assigning benchmarks to the numbers, e.g. the Hochman Pain Scale.

For a while, when filling out a form at a doctor's/PM clinic, I used to make a note that my numbers were in accordance with (whatever) scale. It turned out that that didn't matter because they usually hadn't heard of any of these objective scales, and they really weren't interested anyway.

It turns out that doctors aren't really interested in objectivity or subjectivity; they're interested in relative changes over time, whether it's the nurse coming in to the ER bay to ask us every hour or two (to determine if we're the same, better, or worse) or when they ask us each time we come in for an office visit to determine, again, how we're doing over time. At least this does seem to account for longterm pain seeming to "feel" worse just from wearing us down.

So now that I've existed/endured (I wouldn't call it "living") with chronic pain for several years, and having reviewed several of the objective scales, I kind of have a handle of where I am, so I use that number as my own baseline, and answer the question based on better/same/worse than my own baseline (which is what they're looking for).

As far as telling friends, they may not be savvy to the whole 1-10 thing anyway, so I usually try to analogize it in terms they'll understand, e.g. "Remember how your back & legs felt the day after you moved?" or "ever had sciatica or a spasm/cramp/charliehorse that literally doubled you over or spun you around?" A lot of good articles can be found googling: describing pain.

Doc