ABSTRACT
Pain is defined by the International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP) as “an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage, or described in terms of such damage”1. Because pain is a personal experience incorporating a patient’s emotional response to the nociceptive stimulus, there are no objective measures that allow the severity of one person’s pain to be
validly compared with that of another. Rather, the many scales that have been devised for quantifying pain and pain relief, are only valid for comparison of changes in the severity of pain within individual patients2.
