What evaluating pain and disability can be used for

Cases Evaluate your pain Evaluate your disability

To help your doctor determine the most appropriate treatment for your particular case at any given moment, since:

Some treatments are relatively aggressive, and their use is only justified when the intensity of pain or the degree of disability require it.

Some treatments are move effective in improving pain and others in restoring daily activity, so determining both of these parameters reliably helps your doctor to choose the best combination of treatments that you may need at any given moment.

Determining the course of your pain and disability helps your doctor to objectively assess the effectiveness of previously prescribed treatments, which allows him to adapt them accordingly.

How to evaluate pain and disability

There are some scales developed to evaluate them. Scientific studies have demonstrated that they are reliable and their results show the correlation with intensity of pain and degree of disability due to back pain better than other tests, such as X-rays, Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) or electromyography.

The results of these scales are used to determine the degree of pain or disability in a particular person at a given moment. Therefore, they are useful in evaluating the particular situation and course of a specific patient, but are not necessarily useful in comparing the seriousness of a disease in different people.

Pain and disability must be measured separately. Both aspects are different and they do not correlate with one another well: there are patients in great pain with few restrictions on their daily life and vice-versa. That is why it is a mistake to use pain intensity as an indicator of the degree of disability or vice-versa. Both of these aspects must be measured by different specific scales.

There are many scales for measuring pain and disability due to back pain, but not all of them are reliable. There are two scales used in this section: the "visual analogical scales" for measuring pain, and the "Roland-Morris scale" for assessing disability.

The Editorial Committee of this Web site has chosen these scales because they are simple, they are used all over the world, they can (and must) be filled out directly by the patient without any outside help, and they have proven to be valid and reliable. But there are more scales. All of the scales available for back ailments are listed in a section of the scientific area of this Web site, indicating their characteristics and specifying whether they have been "validated" (that is to say, whether or not there is any data that demonstrates their reliability).

What to do with scale results

Inform your doctor of the results of both scales. That can help him to recommend the most suitable treatment for your case and particular situation.