Tell me EVERYTHING about your pain...

[wwwyzzy]

Just curious... Do you ever feel like asking your patient to describe their pain in detail (location, intensity, duration, quality, alleviating, aggravating factors, etc.) seems to make their pain more intense? Sometimes while I am assessing patients their pain seems to intensify as they go into further and further detail (details which are required by my facility). Sometimes they have declined pain medicine recently and then after this assessment they want pain med right away... hmmm

[MN-Nurse, ASN, RN]

Just curious... Do you ever feel like asking your patient to describe their pain in detail (location, intensity, duration, quality, alleviating, aggravating factors, etc.) seems to make their pain more intense?

No. It's a pain assessment.

[kids]

If these people are chronic pain sufferers asking them to detail their pain can make it (the pain) worse.

(I'm having trouble articulating this...)

When you live with chronic pain you compartmentalize it a lot. You hurt for a lot of different reasons and in a lot of different ways but you lump it as one 'hurt' and deal with it. When you're forced to drag out and examine each component of the 'hurt' it can be overwhelming.

Another thing to consider is that the detailed pain assessment may put people on the defensive, they may feel like they are being questioned because their not believed. It might be helpful to explain to the person ahead of time that the questions are information gathering to help with their treatment and not a judgment on the legitimacy of their pain.