Checklists

Exact information about the pain process is the most crucial and important step towards successful treatment. This requires patience, effort, sometimes detective investigations and, in particular, sometimes revisions and “etchings” of the initially created image.

The most important steps are:

• The patient must collect information about his pain himself.
• The information must be passed on to the doctor.
• The doctor must be interested in the information, engage with the patient, obtain the information through appropriate techniques and methods, and compile the information.
• The patient and doctor must constantly collect the information again, check it and, as the process progresses, connect it with the information initially collected and, if necessary, revise it.

Many affected people are often afraid to report their own observations. As a rule, they themselves do not know that it is not important to give interpretations and explanations, but rather to systematically make their own observations about the course of the pain.

Pain questionnaires

Pain questionnaires are intended to help you remember and specify the characteristics of the various pain disorders in order to then enable specific answers to the questions asked in the doctor-patient conversation. If pain is persistent, a pain calendar should always be used. Without such a basis, every pain diagnosis and every pain treatment remains vague and cannot be rationally understood. The pain calendar also serves to ensure a continuous

• success and
• process control

treatment is possible. Keeping a blood pressure calendar or blood sugar log is a given for people who suffer from high blood pressure or diabetes mellitus. Even for pain disorders, it is now standard practice to keep a pain calendar.

The exchange of information must pave the way to effective therapy. For example, when fitting new glasses, the ophthalmologist has to try out different lenses until he finds the optimal lens for the individual patient. The situation is similar in pain therapy, but it sometimes takes a little longer until the right and tolerable therapy can be found and adapted for a patient.