The McGill Pain Questionnaire uses descriptive words to categorize pain into sensory, affective, evaluative, and miscellaneous categories, allowing patients to give a more accurate description of their pain for better pain management and diagnosis. It has 20 subcategories and is more useful than numerical rankings.
A McGill Pain Questionnaire is a chart containing descriptive words about pain. Words are normally divided into four main categories: sensory, affective, evaluative, and miscellaneous. Within these categories are a few sub-categories containing words used to describe the intensity of a particular feeling or emotional response. Following a particular method, patients select the most applicable words from each category to tell their doctors about their pain with the greatest possible precision and accuracy. This can lead to better pain management and, in some cases, better and faster diagnosis.
While there are several versions of the McGill Pain Questionnaire, the most common version has 20 subcategories of descriptive words. The first ten concern the particular sensory experience of pain. The sensory subcategories of the McGill Pain Questionnaire organize pain from flickering to pounding, pinching to squeezing, hot to searing, and others. The word chosen in each subcategory indicates the pain intensity in each category.
Subcategories 11-15 of the McGill Pain Questionnaire address the affective or emotional effects of pain. The ranges of feelings in the affective category include tiring to exhausting, fearful to terrifying, punishing to killing, and others. This helps doctors determine the amount of discomfort the pain is causing and, in some cases, the urgency of treatment and pain management.
The third category of the McGill Pain Questionnaire, which tends to contain no subcategories and is only one section of the graph, contains evaluative words. These are general words that patients can use to express the relative level of discomfort caused by their pain in a very general sense. A common set of words used in this category are: annoying, annoying, miserable, intense, unbearable. Each word expresses a slightly higher level of intensity than the previous word.
Miscellaneous descriptors are generally contained in the last three subcategories of the McGill Standard Pain Questionnaire. This category addresses issues such as the relative coldness, tightness, or sharpness of the pain in question. Those descriptors may be important, but they don’t fit particularly well in the other categories.
Many pain questionnaires are based on purely numerical rankings of various aspects of pain. The McGill Pain Questionnaire is useful because it relies primarily on descriptive words that allow patients to give a more accurate description of their pain. A scale that relies on a simple rating of one to ten is often nearly meaningless, as the same number can have drastically different meanings to different people. Some versions of the McGill Pain Questionnaire are supplemented with numerical rankings, graphs to show where the pain is, and additional descriptive words to explain the temporal nature of the pain.
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