Is it possible to measure our patients' pain?

This study aims to describe and discuss the main instruments for assessing chronic musculoskeletal pain and its associated symptoms and syndromes. The treatment of patients with chronic pain, regardless of the underlying disease, presents challenges inherent to its multidimensional nature. One of the main challenges is how to measure the outcomes of interventions. The most common forms of measurement are analog scales. These are considered unidimensional because they assess only pain intensity, without considering other clinical aspects. Questionnaires with multidimensional scales have the advantage of capturing not only pain intensity but also other accompanying phenomena, such as the degree of disability, emotional aspects, and even social and occupational impacts. Regarding multidimensional instruments for pain assessment, we cite the Brief Pain Inventory and the McGill Pain Questionnaire. Other multidimensional instruments include: Clinically Aligned Pain Assessment (CAPA) Tool, Defense and Veterans Pain Rating Scale, Geriatric Pain Measure, Pain Impact Questionnaire (PIQ-6), Pain Monitor, and Short Form-36 Bodily Pain Scale (SF-36 BPS). As for more specific questionnaires, there are the Fibromyalgia Impact Questionnaire, the Fibromyalgia Scale, and the Central Sensitization Inventory. Among the symptoms that most frequently accompany chronic pain, fatigue and sleep disturbances stand out. These have specific questionnaires for their assessment and are also included in more generic instruments. In conclusion, the search for a simple and applicable metric for chronic pain is still far from being achieved.