Pain is not the fifth vital sign
After years of exaggeration, misinformation and a national epidemic of opioid and heroin abuse, the nation is finally coming to terms with the fact that pain is not the fifth vital sign.
After years of exaggeration, misinformation and a
Further reading:
The misguided acceptance of pain as the fifth vital sign has been, and still is, the single biggest mistake in the history of modern medical pain management.
In the early ‘90s, the American Pain Society opined that there was a national epidemic of untreated pain in our nation’s hospitals and announced that pain should be classified as the fifth vital sign. This assertion is riddled with many problems. Vital signs are clinical measurements, specifically: pulse rate, temperature, respiration rate and blood pressure, that all indicate the state of a patient's essential body functions.
These clinical measures are very objective in character and include an assortment of relevant numerical values. Pain is a subjective feeling that is impossible to accurately and consistently quantify across patient populations. Therefore, in order for providers to assess pain as a vital sign, they must ascribe a numerical value for it, such as zero to ten based on the Universal Numeric Pain Scale.
As a result of equating pain as a vital sign, medical practitioners must come up with a reliable and effective treatment if and when a patient subjectively rates their pain high on the scale.
In 1998, the Federation of American Medical Boards issued a policy reassuring physicians that “in the course of treatment,” large doses of opioids were acceptable. In 2001, the Joint Commission mandated that hospitals across the country assess pain on each patient they treat.
Popular on our site:
Internal server error