There was a comment on our site that mentioned using a pain log to keep track of one’s pain. The idea is to rate one’s pain daily, weekly or at some other interval in order to see if there is improvement or deterioration over time. This can be very helpful in evaluating a change in treatment or self-management. It is not the day-to-day scores that are important because pain varies so much. Rather, it is the trend of the scores over weeks and months that provide the really useful information.

The down side is that it’s possible to get obsessed with your scores. If you start feeling overly distressed by your ratings or read too much into them, these negatives will have to be weighed against the benefits of keeping a log. Please remember that your ratings are simply an attempt to capture an experience (that of pain) at the precise time you write down your score for the day. Virtually all the scientific methods of measuring pain are attempting the same thing and limited by the difficulty of translating a personal experience into a set of numbers.

One of the simplest tools for measuring pain is the visual analogue scale. A recent study showed it is more reliable than measuring your pain on a scale of 1-10.  Simply measure a 10 cm. line on a piece of paper. On the right end of the line mark ‘no pain’ and on the left ‘worst pain’.

To measure your pain simply put a mark on the line somewhere between ‘no pain’ and ‘worst pain’. Try not to think in numbers but simply on the severity of what you are feeling when you decide on your rating. The distance in centimeters between ‘no pain’ and your mark is your pain score. Round off your measurements to the nearest 0.5 cm.

If you do this daily and at the same time every day, you will have a fairly reliable record of your pain. Research indicates that changes of less than 2.0 cm. probably mean very little in terms of real changes in your pain. This should remind you to keep any changes in your scores in perspective.

The visual analog scale is one of many tools used to measure pain. Some are more reliable and/or valid than others. Some are simple and some complex. But they all run into the same barrier: how can we objectively measure what is a subjective phenomenon, the lived experience of chronic pain?