Pain description by nurses and physicians.

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to determine if nurses and physicians selected similar words to describe painlike experiences and to determine how they rated terms commonly used to describe pain. Thirty-seven registered nurses and 21 physicians comprised the sample. The Visual Analogue Scale (VAS) was used to measure the terms ache, hurt, and pain. The McGill Pain Questionnaire (MPQ) provided a list of word descriptors from which the subjects selected words that best represented the terms ache, hurt, and pain. There was no significant differences between the nurses and physicians in the mean rating of any of the pain terms on the VAS. The nurses and physicians chose very similar word descriptors from the MPQ to discriminate one pain term from another. These findings suggest that nurses and physicians may have a common understanding of the language used to describe painlike experiences.