Hands up if you ever felt dismissed or misunderstood about your pain? Yes – there are a lot of us who have felt that way at one time or another.

One time, when I was in my early 20s, I had just had another episode of severe lower back pain brought on by my work as a nurse. I went down to the emergency room to see if there was anything that could be done. It wasn’t my first visit there, but I also wasn’t what one may call a “frequent flyer” either.

I remember standing against the stretcher because it was too painful to sit and I could hear the attending doctor talk to the residents about back pain. He went on and on about how most presentations of back pain were just calls for attention or a desire to get off work. He spoke to them for at least five or ten minutes while I stood on the other side of the curtain listening to him. When a resident finally came in to examine me, I asked him why he was going to bother because he obviously now had some preconceived ideas of what my problem was.

Pain of any type is hard to describe to someone who hasn’t experienced it. It’s subjective and what may be intensely painful to one person, may be only mildly uncomfortable to another. That’s not to say that one person is stronger – it’s that everyone’s perception of pain is different and no-one’s pain should be more believable than anyone else’s.

The Let’s Talk Pain Coalition performed a survey of both patients and physicians. I think that many people won’t find the results all that unexpected: New survey reveals communication gap between health care professionals and pain patients.

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Tags: chronic pain blog, pain blog, lower back pain, pain patients, pain perception

Hands up if you ever felt dismissed or misunderstood about your pain? Yes – there are a lot of us who have felt that way at one time or another.

One time, when I was in my early 20s, I had just had another episode of severe lower back pain brought on by my work as a nurse. I went down to the emergency room to see if there was anything that could be done. It wasn’t my first visit there, but I also wasn’t what one may call a “frequent flyer” either.

I remember standing against the stretcher because it was too painful to sit and I could hear the attending doctor talk to the residents about back pain.

Click here to read more.

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Tags: chronic pain blog, pain blog, lower back pain, pain patients, pain perception