McGill Pain Questionnaire [pdf]

[not a doctor, but...]

Saying that they sum everything is there to catch people trying to game the system by maxing everything out.

The first part gets you to describe your symptoms, the last 6 questions get you to rate your pain, and compare it to other likely painful situations you've experienced.

If you're too busy screaming and throw the clipboard back at them, you might need some help. Or you really know how to game the system.

>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...