Many of my patients tonight will calmly complain of pain rating “10″ on a scale of one to ten. My job is to distinguish sick vs. not sick. Relaying ten out of ten pain makes this much easier.
March 4, 2007
March 4, 2007
Many of my patients tonight will calmly complain of pain rating “10″ on a scale of one to ten. My job is to distinguish sick vs. not sick. Relaying ten out of ten pain makes this much easier.
March 15, 2007 at 4:24 pm
That’s right. If you walk into the ER with all your homies and you’re talking on your cell phone and drinking a forty-two ounce pepsi and tell me you have 10 our of 10 pain then i know you are not sick.
If you are wheeled into triage by your concerned family member because you are in such pain you are puking and trying to pass out at the same time and tell me your pain is an 8 out of 10, then I will know you are sick and rush you right back.
March 26, 2007 at 11:30 pm
I figure I should stop lurking and say that I really enjoy your blog!
It’s funny too that sometimes the nurses are so used to patients saying 10 out of 10 that they fill it in for you. I’m not in the medical field, but recently had muscle spasms in my neck on a Friday night painful enough that I’d been unable to sleep more than about 45 minutes by 4:30 am. At that point I figured I may as well get up and go to urgentcare and at least get some cyclobenzaprine. In triage the nurse asked me the standard pain rating thing and I said that if I kept very still and sat very straight, it was maybe a 2, and that moving around or staying in the same position made it much worse, so maybe… She cut me off and said 10 out of 10. I was sorta shocked because I was clearly able to move around (even if I didn’t have much range of motion in my neck) and was not in too much distress. I told her no, I’d subluxed a few joints and had a baby, so I knew where 10 out of 10 was, and this was maybe 5 or 6. Enough that I was grouchy and unable to sleep and didn’t want to wait two sleepless painful days to see my GP on Monday, but no worse.
Honestly I think the pain scale is kinda stupid because it’s a relative scale (“compared to the worst pain you’ve ever felt”) but no one ever asks you what the worst pain you’ve ever felt _is_. Kidney stone? Limb broken in seven places? Or a bruise or a paper cut? It seems like it’s useful once a patient is being treated for whatever is wrong with them, because if they are honest, it lets a doctor know how distressed a patient feels as a result of their pain, and therefore, whether and what treatment is appropriate. But as a triage mechanism, it seems poorly adapted.
February 28, 2009 at 8:00 am
I just read your entire blog over the past 2 days and I’m hooked!
July 22, 2009 at 11:20 am
Like the commenter above, I have read your entire blog and enjoyed it immensely.
I wish you continued success as well as steady, not-too-busy shifts.
>:)