Fifty years on the Visual Analogue Scale (VAS) for pain-intensity is still good for acute pain. But multidimensional assessment is needed for chronic pain

Abstract

The Dorfman et al. paper is one of several recent publications uestioning the usefulness of pain-intensity as an only measureent in chronic pain. Thus, Jane Ballantyne and Mark Sullivan ate last year (2015) in the New England Journal of Medicine asked hether intensity of chronic pain is thewrongmetric [2] and again his year (2016) in PAIN they state that it is not necessary to reduce ain-intensity in order to treat chronic pain well [3]. Fayers et al. 4] on behalf of the European Palliative Care Research Collaboration ocus on the differences in reports of pain intensity and pain intererence among chronic pain patients and palliative care patients in ain. In 2015 in the journalQuality of Life ResearchCook et al. [5] call or establishing a common metric for self-reported pain by linking cales for pain interference with SF-36 bodily pain subscale.