Pain intensity assessment
Pain is a subjective and personal sensation and emotion.
The patient should be the prime assessor of his or her pain. Involving the patient closely in the assessment of pain and goal setting encourages trust and enhances the probability of successful pain control.
Numerous assessment tools are available to help with this. Numerical rating scales quantify the intensity of pain using numbers ranging from 0 to 10. Numerical pain scales may also include words or descriptions to better label symptoms.
Visual analogue scales convey the amount of pain that a patient feels across a continuum from none to an extreme amount on pain.
The McGill Pain Questionnaire has both sensory descriptors – like burning, shooting aching – and affective ones – like tiring, sickening and vicious.
The Leeds Assessment Neuropathic Symptoms and Sign consists of 5 symptom items and 2 examination items, and assesses whether the pain experienced is predominately due to nerve damage or not. Both of the examinations result in the patient being scored out of a total of 24. A patient with a score of 12 or more on this scale is diagnosed as suffering from neuropathic pain to some degree.