What Your Doctor Should Ask You About Pain
By LanaPA
January 25
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Many patients do not tell their doctors how much pain they are in, so "doctors generally should approach patients in pain with the assumption that underreporting is a real likelihood," says Russell Portenoy, MD, chairman of the Department of Pain Medicine and Palliative Care at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York City.
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Comments (2 comments)
Add your commentI know when I am even doing well there is always discomfort. On a good day the pain in my hands, feet, and the back of my ribs are still there. Probably a 2. There are days that I don't feel my hip. So when I tell the doctor I'm doing well I guess I still have pain and I guess that is not totally honest. Doing well for me may be different than it would be for someone else. Someone else may be good at level 4 pain or maybe at 0. Maybe the doctor should be asking us what doing well means to us on a scale of 0-10.
It is most unfortunate that doctors schedule so little time with their patients. In the 5 or 10 minutes in the office, there is no possibility of even forming a sentence by the time the doctor is finished reviewing your chart to refresh his memory. The industry, yes I'm calling it an industry, is so dollar driven. Driven by revenue from office visits and driven by pharmaceutical companies…
Underreporting? Well perhaps a questionnaire from the doctor at the end of the visit to be returned with the next visit. Maybe then, you'ld get to speak and make sense of it all!