Pain as bad as you can imagine or extremely severe pain? A randomized controlled trial comparing two pain scale anchors.

ABSTRACT:

Background

A common method of pain assessment is the numerical rating scale, where patients are asked to rate their pain on a scale from 0 to 10, where 0 is "no pain" and 10 is "pain as bad as you can imagine". We hypothesize such language is suboptimal as it involves a test of a cognitive skill, imagination, in the assessment of symptom severity.

Methods

We used a large-scale online research registry, ResearchMatch, to conduct a randomized controlled trial to compare the distributions of pain scores of two different pain scale anchors. We recruited adults located in the United States who reported a chronic pain problem (> 3 months) and were currently in pain. Participants were randomized in a 1:1 ratio to receive pain assessment based on a modified Brief Pain Inventory (BPI

SUBMITTER: Tin AL 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10686922 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature