ABSTRACT
There is growing recognition that the management of the patient with cancer pain must have goals beyond analgesia alone. These patients often have a degree of the psychological distress disproportionate to the severity of pain, as well as multiple symptoms other than pain, each of which may be influenced by physical, psychological, and social factors that change continually and unpredictably over time. From a theoretical standpoint, most discussions of the quality of life implicitly endorse a multidimensional view of health that encompasses both the lack of disease and the experience of well-being. Pain assessment has usually, but not always, been incorporated into scales designed to evaluate symptom distress and general health status. Pain, like quality of life, is a subjective and multidimensional perception. One clinically relevant conceptualization suggests that pain has three major dimensions, comprising a sensory-discriminative component, an affective-motivational component, and a cognitive-evaluative component.
