Pain assessment

Can pain be measured? 

Now that the semester has come to an end, we have learned a good amount of knowledge on how to construct and run a test. To start off, we first need to figure out a variable that we want to test. Then we should find a way to define that variable, and apply or develop a test that can measure this variable. For example, if we want to test pain, we first need to define what pain is.

According to Wikipidia, “Pain” is a staple food prepared by baking a dough of flour and water. But “pain” ≠ “pain” ! (p.s. Le pain in French means bread)

Pain is a universal human experience, and everyone should have experienced it in their life time. The perception of pain varies from people to people. Some have high pain tolerance and some cries during a normal vaccine injection. However, the major problem in pain assessment is that there is no general accepted definition of pain. So it is hard to try to quantify the variable. Pain is also influence by emotional and personality factors. Thus, pain assessment should be focus on evaluating a psychological profile for each participant.

The most common way to assess pain might be scaling the pain. This is not only used in psychological experience, it is also used in clinical setting. When a patient report abdominal pain, the nurse or the doctor usually will ask how painful it is. But then this brings another problem: each individual has a different scale, how can we make sure that the pain I suffer is the same scale as the pain you suffer. The answer is we cannot. Simply because it is subjective.

The classic cold pressor study is a study that measures pain tolerance. Participants first put their hands in room temperature water to temp hands. Then immerse both of my hands up to the wrist into the cold water for as long as they can, signal the researcher when they start to feel pain. They can pull out their hands when they are not able to take it anymore. The time interval is the indication for pain tolerance. However, because pain is subjective, each person’s pain tolerant level varies, researchers usually compares the data of each participants rather than running the comparison with the whole group.

In conclusion, for assessing pain, we need to treat each participant individually. It is usually accompanied with another psychological factor (e.g. expectation etc.) . Defining a variable is always the first step for constructing a test.