Pain Assessment

Pain Assessment

Denise Li and Kathleeen Puntillo are from the Department of Physiological Nursing, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, Calif. Scale has been evaluated in sedated ICU patients receiving mechanical ventilation. The Behavioral Pain Scale consists of 3 behavioral domains (ie, facial expression, movements of upper limbs, and compliance with ventilation). These domains have differ...

Assessment of Back Pain

Assessment of pain.

UNLABELLED Valid and reliable assessment of pain is essential for both clinical trials and effective pain management. The nature of pain makes objective measurement impossible. Acute pain can be reliably assessed, both at rest (important for comfort) and during movement (important for function and risk of postoperative complications), with one-dimensional tools such as numeric rating scales or ...

Challenges in pain assessment.

LAST YEAR WAS the 40-year anniversary of Margo McCaffery’s landmark definition of pain: ‘‘Pain is what the experiencing person says it is, existing whenever he says it does.’’ This definition has been supported by decades of clinical trials of analgesics and other pain research. All accepted pain guidelines today reflect the philosophy of McCaffery’s definition, reinforcing that the patient’s s...

Assessment of neuropathic pain

Neuropathic pain is defined as ‘pain initiated or caused by a primary lesion or dysfunction of the nervous system’. It can be a debilitating and difficult condition to treat and is often resistant to simple analgesics, requiring additional analgesic approaches. Recent estimates suggest that up to 8% of the general population suffer with pain that is associated with neuropathic features and, whe...