Jeff Langmaid argues the standard 0-10 pain scale is too subjective and unreliable. Low back and neck problems account for 75% of disability from musculoskeletal conditions. He proposes pressure pain threshold as a more objective way to measure pain.
75%
Get this. 75% of the total years lived with disability that's related to musculoskeletal is low back and neck related. So, like, almost all of it. 75%. That's staggering. So it's really important, as we talked about last week with causal beliefs, it's really important to be able to assess pain. Why would we want to do that? Well, pain assessment tools enable us to monitor the progression of what's going on, as you can imagine. And there's no valid or really reliable biomarker for pain. So a lot of times we're relying on qualitative measures. For example, like self assessments. They're great because you're like, where are you at 0 to 10? And you can get an answer, but it's super subjective and there can be, like, a high degree of error. So a pressure pain threshold, by design, is to say, okay, well, is there something else we can do other than just asking that question to be able to get a better objective assessment? And it might not be perfectly objective, but at least we can maybe limit some of the error. Right, some of that spectrum.
