Pain Forum
Volume 8, Issue 4 , Pages 195-197, Winter 1999

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  • Richard B. North

      Affiliations

    • Corresponding Author InformationReprint requests: Richard B. North, MD, Professor of Neurosurgery, Anesthesiology, and Critical Care Medicine, The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, 600 N. Wolfe St., Meyer 7–113, Baltimore, MD 21287-7713.

Departments of Neurosurgery, Anesthesiology, and Critical Care Medicine, The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, Maryland

The “modern” criterion of 50% pain relief has long-standing precedents in the “ancient” literature. We agree that other measures of outcome, which reflect pain relief indirectly, are important, and accordingly for over two decades have routinely reported activities of daily living, return to work, patient satisfaction, need for additional treatment, and medication requirements. Physician and patient may deceive themselves (L. fallax, deceit) by undue reliance on any single outcome criterion. Relief of pain per se, however, is most relevant to the patient's presenting complaint, and however we choose to quantitate it, it is a sine qua non.

Key words: patient satisfaction, pain relief, outcome measures, SCS, chronic pain

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PII: S1082-3174(99)70008-5

doi:10.1016/S1082-3174(99)70008-5

Pain Forum
Volume 8, Issue 4 , Pages 195-197, Winter 1999

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