Mcgill Pain Questionnaire
In every century humanity makes another exciting discovery toward helping people manage pain better and the Mcgill pain questionnaire is one such innovation. All doctors will attest to the fact that understanding what a patient really means by 'pain' is not black and white. To begin with, the extent of pain in similar circumstances is in different intensities in different people. Secondly, pain is really not straight forward and what could be a tingling sensation in one patient could be a burning sensation in another, yet both will express their feeling as pain. What the Mcgill pain questionnaire helps doctors to do is to categorize and understand what the patient explains based on a tabulation of certain words that the patient will use to describe that they are feeling.
The Mcgill pain questionnaire has a series of words arranged in groups and the patient identifies which words best describe their sensation from each the words grouped together in one set. The questionnaire guides the patient to select different words in several steps at the end of which they should have a set of words that best describe their feeling. The Mcgill pain questionnaire is a tool that you can use at home before you go to visit your physician if you have a concern about some pain that you are experiencing. As a tool, the questionnaire can greatly enhance correct diagnosis of disease as it removes the multiple meanings from the word 'pain'.
Other than serving doctors well in medical practice, the Mcgill pain questionnaire has also opened up a new arena of medical research that specifically deals with the anatomy of pain. For many years the medical profession considered pain a bodily function. However, this tool is opening up a completely new arena that suggests that pain is a lot more of the work of the brain than it is the work of the nervous system. As the Mcgill pain questionnaire begins to send ripples in the medical world, patients are likely to find better answers to some of the chronic causes of pain that the medical world has commonly dismissed as 'its all in the mind'.
In every century humanity makes another exciting discovery toward helping people manage pain better and the Mcgill pain questionnaire is one such innovation. All doctors will attest to the fact that understanding what a patient really means by 'pain' is not black and white. To begin with, the extent of pain in similar circumstances is in different intensities in different people. Secondly, pain is really not straight forward and what could be a tingling sensation in one patient could be a burning sensation in another, yet both will express their feeling as pain. What the Mcgill pain questionnaire helps doctors to do is to categorize and understand what the patient explains based on a tabulation of certain words that the patient will use to describe that they are feeling.
The Mcgill pain questionnaire has a series of words arranged in groups and the patient identifies which words best describe their sensation from each the words grouped together in one set. The questionnaire guides the patient to select different words in several steps at the end of which they should have a set of words that best describe their feeling. The Mcgill pain questionnaire is a tool that you can use at home before you go to visit your physician if you have a concern about some pain that you are experiencing. As a tool, the questionnaire can greatly enhance correct diagnosis of disease as it removes the multiple meanings from the word 'pain'.
Other than serving doctors well in medical practice, the Mcgill pain questionnaire has also opened up a new arena of medical research that specifically deals with the anatomy of pain. For many years the medical profession considered pain a bodily function. However, this tool is opening up a completely new arena that suggests that pain is a lot more of the work of the brain than it is the work of the nervous system. As the Mcgill pain questionnaire begins to send ripples in the medical world, patients are likely to find better answers to some of the chronic causes of pain that the medical world has commonly dismissed as 'its all in the mind'.
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