
McGill Pain Questionnaire [pdf] - bookofjoe
https://www.sralab.org/sites/default/files/2017-07/McGill%20Pain%20Questionnaire%20%281%29.pdf
======
woliveirajr
I'm not sure how someone would use such questionary, as simply summing up
points and comparing the final result doesn't seem to be useful by itself.

What's the purpose of this?

~~~
bookofjoe
>In the 1970s, Dr. Melzack turned to another problem he had been thinking
about for years: pain measurement. At the time, doctors had only very crude
instruments, like simply asking people to rate their pain level on a scale
from 1 to 10 (a method that is still in use). As a young researcher, Dr.
Melzack had worked in a chronic pain clinic and befriended a 70-year-old woman
with diabetes.

“She was a highly intelligent person with a good vocabulary, and I began to
collect her descriptive words about pain, like ‘burning,’ ‘shooting,’
‘horrible’ and ‘excruciating,’” he told McGill Reporter in a 2008 interview.

He continued to build his adjective collection by listening to many patients’
descriptions and, working with a statistician, divided them into 20
categories, each describing a particular kind of pain: “tugging,” “pulling”
and “wrenching” in one category, for instance, and “pinching,” “pressing” and
“gnawing” in another.

This descriptive catalog, published in the journal Pain in 1975, became the
McGill Pain Questionnaire. It soon became a standard measure worldwide, deeply
enriching the conversations doctors have with their patients, and in many
cases helping with diagnosis.

See also: [https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/12/science/ronald-melzack-
de...](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/12/science/ronald-melzack-dead.html)

