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Individual patients
have different pain
tolerances, so ask-
ing them to rate
their level of post-op
discomfort on an
scale of 1 to 10
could contribute to
the opioid crisis,
says Girish P. Joshi,
MBBS, MD, FFARC-
SI, a professor of anesthesiology and pain management at the
University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas.
One of the problems associated with using pain scores to treat
a patient's discomfort is that pain is relative and a difficult con-
cept for patients to fully understand, says Dr. Joshi. How they
score their pain really depends on their past experiences.
"If zero is no pain and 10 is the worst pain of their life, a
patient may not really understand what that correlates to," he
says. "For some, a score of seven may be excruciating. Others
might not think it translates to much discomfort."
Dr. Joshi says facilities needed to reduce their overall pain
scores in order to avoid getting dinged during accreditation sur-
veys and believes they may inadvertently overprescribe opioids
to keep scores low. This, he says, could have led to opioid
dependence in patients.
Instead of using the standard 1-10 scale to gauge post-op
All Patients Perceive Pain Differently
SURGERY HURTS Make sure patients have realistic expectations of the level
of pain they'll feel during recovery.
KEEPING SCORE
