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Unless you are a masochist, pain is not one of your favorite things. Even though feeling pain can indicate damage to your body, which in turn allows us to understand that something is wrong, the sensation itself is far from pleasurable. What most people might not know is that there is a pain level scale, which is used to assess the amount of pain the person is feeling.
Usage of Pain Scales
To understand the pain scale, first of all, it must be explained why it is valuable in the first place to do so. In most cases, pain assessment scales are used in medical settings to gauge how a patient is feeling. It allows doctors to estimate which medicine and how much of it should be prescribed to a patient. After that, pain scales can be used again to check whether the medicine is working as intended, or whether dosage or certain medicine used should be changed for another. T
Two Main Types of Pain Scales
There are two main types of pain scales, which are self-reported and observational. The former is simple, because the patient himself rates his pain, usually on a scale from 0 to 10 on how much pain he is experiencing at the moment. The latter is trickier, because medical experts are estimating the pain level which a patient is experiencing by observing his movements and reactions to certain triggers. Both of these two types of pain scales have their own place, but these days most doctors are using self-reported pain scales because they are usually more objective than the observational ones.
Numeric Rating Scale: NRS 11
This is a pain scale which allows a person to rate their pain on a scale from 0 to 10. It can be used by adults and children of 10 years old or older. The scale is rather simple, 0 meaning no pain, 5 meaning moderate pain, and 10 meaning the worst possible pain.
Stanford Pain Scale
This pain scale is more elaborative than the previous one, as it has descriptions attached to each point of the scale, which also ranges from 0 to 10. This particular pain level scale might be the most popular around the globe because descriptors of pain levels can help both patients and doctors to better gauge the situation of pain experienced.
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