The Impact Of Pain Management On Quality Of Life

It's not just painful and unpleasant, it also has an enormous negative effect on everything you do, including mood, capacity to complete daily tasks, and various other areas of your daily life. A study conducted by the World Health Organization found that those who are suffering from chronic discomfort are more likely experience depression or anxiety as compared to those who don't suffer from it, and twice as likely to be unable to working. Continue To Read for more information about relief of pain now.

The United States is facing one of the most significant medical issues which is pain. Pain is the most common reason Americans seek out a physician for an initial complaint. This is a misleading figure since a significant amount of people who suffer from pain don't see a doctor. In one of the largest surveys concerning pain, 18% of respondents who said their pain was extreme or uncontrollable had never seen a healthcare specialist, as they believed that anyone could alleviate their pain.

The cost of suffering are expensive, both for the healthcare system as well as to the general public. In addition, people with pain have a greater percentage of patients using the healthcare system, but also their productivity is substantially diminished. According to estimates, more than 4 billion hours of work are lost due to pain each year. Based on an average US income of $23,000 per year, pain can result in $55 billion in lost productivity every year for full-time employees.

These expenses can be astronomical, but the most significant impact of pain on the quality of life is definitely the negative impact it has on your life. Pain is widely believed to be among the most important determinants of living quality, which can be described as an individual's ability to perform a range of social roles and to reach an acceptable level of satisfaction in those roles, 6 However, quality-of-life research is, in general, in its infancy, and the effect of symptoms such as pain on one's quality of life is only getting recognized. It is becoming increasingly apparent the it is beginning to be considered to be one of the primary outcome domains to be measured in the evaluation of any health-related therapy or intervention.9 Quality of life is a subtle indicator than the typically measured variables of efficacy and safety however, it could be more indicative of treatment value and may be more relevant in terms of patient satisfaction and determination to follow through with the prescribed treatment.

Measurement of Quality of Life Measurement of Quality of Life: The Scales and Beyond

There are many ways to measure quality of life. Numerous instruments are available to aid you in doing this. Several questions need to be addressed to determine the most appropriate instrument for any given circumstance. In the present context we assume that we're referring to the health-related quality of our lives which is more specific than general health.

Which is more applicable is a disease-specific instrument or a general instrument?

Instruments specifically designed for this purpose are used to measure quality of life for a specific disease, such as arthritis or cancer. Many instruments specifically designed for this purpose are available in nearly every disease category such as prostate cancer. For instance there are at most four instruments that are specifically for prostate cancer only. The drawback of instruments that are specific to prostate cancer is that they make it difficult to compare results across different disease conditions. Generic instruments are made to measure the quality of life of any condition and across disease states also. They are advantageous because they allow groups of patients with various ailments to be compared each other. They're not particularly useful to determine the degree of improvement of a specific disease because of their broad range of types. Thus, they may not pick up subtle but important changes in the quality of life resulting from a given treatment.

The classic example of a generic instrument for measuring quality of life is the Medical Outcomes Study Short Form 36 or SF-36. The SF-36 is a 36-item survey of general health that was developed to bring together the comprehensiveness of much longer surveys and the shortness of relatively coarse single-item surveys. It can be completed by self or administered via computer or by a certified interviewer in person or via the telephone.