Chronic pain patients across the board are constantly fighting the feeling of being misunderstood. We feel like friends, family, and doctors won’t understand us when we try and communicate our reality with chronic pain. Most of us don’t even try and communicate this very real and very difficult part of our lives.
When the time comes, and we have to attempt to explain to the outside world what is going on inside of our bodies, we are given poorly put together work sheets related to general pain. General pain, not chronic pain. Somehow the only tool we have been given to communicate our chronic pain to our medical care providers, doesn’t adequately represent us, specifically.
With that being said, I do believe it is time for a change. We need to separate chronic pain from the emergency room standard pain scale. Hopefully with enough backing we can do so! I have learned an efficient way to communicate to my doctors what is my chronic pain. My chronic pain scale looks something like this: We still keep a standard 1-10 scale but this time we split it in half. Pain levels 1-5 are functioning pain levels, meaning if you’re at a 5 you are in a significant amount of pain, but because we have chronic pain, we are still able to continue on through our routine. Anything above the 5 means that your pain is now interfering with how you function in your day to day life. If you are at a 10, this will tell the doctor that you are severely limited in what you are able to. I want us to be able to properly and efficiently communicate with our doctors. So many patients I have spoken with are frustrated with how vague the standard pain scale is in terms of chronic pain. I believe that by redefining the pain scale, we can better communicate where we are in our pain management and treatments and not feel so lost.
If you feel strongly about this issue, I would encourage you to share this article and even print it out to take with you to your doctors appointments. We may not be able to redefine the pain scale across the board, but we can help ourselves by at least starting out locally!