The McGill Pain Questionnaire

On the language of pain. By Ronald Melzack, Warren S. Torgerson. Anesthesiology 1971; 34:50-9. Reprinted with permission. The purpose of this study was to develop new approaches to the problem of describing and measuring pain in human subjects. Words used to describe pain were brought together and categorized, and an attempt was made to scale them on a common intensity dimension. The data show that: 1) there are many words in the English language to describe the varieties of pain experience; 2) there is a high level of agreement that the words fall into classes and subclasses that represent particular dimensions or properties of pain experience; 3) substantial portions of the words have approximately the same relative positions on a common intensity scale for people who have widely divergent backgrounds. The word lists provide a basis for a questionnaire to study the effects of anesthetic and analgesic agents on the experience of pain.

Deqi Sensation Between the Acupuncture-Experienced and the Naïve: A Korean Study II

Previous experience of acupuncture is believed to affect people's expectation of future treatments. Therefore, subjects who have had acupuncture are generally excluded from sham-controlled acupuncture clinical trials. However, this assumption has not been proven, but just accepted because of the lack of evidence to the contrary. To investigate the difference in frequency and intensity of acupuncture sensation between subjects who have had acupuncture and those who have not, 36 acupuncture-experienced subjects were invited to take part in the study. After informed consent was obtained, participants were asked to complete the acupuncture sensation scale (ASS) according to what they expected needling to feel like. The needling was done at the left Hegu (LI 4) point and consisted of insertion, stimulation for 30 seconds and removal. After needling, the subjects were asked to complete the same ASS according to what they actually experienced. Adverse events were monitored. The frequency of each sensation expected and experienced, as well as acupuncture sensation scores were compared. More than 60% of the subjects expected to feel sensations of penetrating (87.6% to 100%), aching (71.2% to 95.5%), tingling (87.6% to 100%), pricking (79.7% to 99.2%) and throbbing (64.2% to 91.4%). In fact, the subjects experienced sharp (60.9% to 89.1%), intense (60.9% to 89.1%), radiating (71.2% to 95.5%) and heavy (74.8% to 97.4%) sensations just as much. The subjects expected more hurting ( p =0.001), tingling ( p <0.001), pricking ( p =0.010), stinging ( p =0.012), burning ( p =0.001) and pulsing ( p =0.009) than they experienced, while more heaviness ( p =0.011) was experienced than expected. The same outcome measures were also compared between experienced and naïve groups. Apart from the fact that the acupuncture-experienced participants expected to feel pricking ( p =0.030) and stinging ( p =0.002), and experienced hurting ( p =0.022) and stinging ( p =0.028) significantly less than those who had not had acupuncture before, there was no significant difference between first time and experienced subjects. The results indicate that previous experience does not affect the people's expectation and does not hinder people from experiencing Deqi. In addition, a constellation of Deqi-related acupuncture-specific sensations is more than just a general pain intensity dimension, which requires a biochemical and physiological exploration.

On the Protheticity of Olfactory Pleasantness and Intensity

In Exp. 1, the “protheticity” of the pleasantness of a diverse set of relatively isointensive odorants was estimated using exponents from power functions fitted by an iterative least squares procedure between scale values established by (a) magnitude estimation and (b) category rating and rank ordering. In Exp. 2, this procedure was applied to intensity data derived from quarter-log-step volume dilution series of two hedonically disparate odorants, furfural and methyl salicylate. The goodness of fit of the power functions was somewhat better for the intensity than for the pleasantness data. The pleasantness dimension of the diverse stimuli was slightly prothetic (respective category scaling and rank order/magnitude estimation exponents = 0.60 and 0.63). The intensity dimension of furfural was considerably more prothetic than that of methyl salicylate (respective category/magnitude estimation exponents = 0.20 and 0.68; respective rank order/magnitude exponents = 0.21 and 0.69). These data suggest that the degree of olfactory protheticity depends upon the stimuli as well as the attributes chosen for investigation and support the view that Stevens' metathetic/prothetic dichotomy has little utility in classifying the scaling attributes of odors. Whether the degree of protheticity reflects the nature or distribution of olfactory system receptive elements within the main olfactory pathway remains an empirical question which awaits a more specific understanding of the nature of olfactory coding at the level of the neuroepithelium.