Question

1- In regards to psychological aspects of pain, where do you stand in the intersection of psychiatric and chronic pain?

2- One of the pain assessment methods is Visual Analog Scales (VAS), read the attached article and answer the following questions:

What are the advantages and disadvantages of VAS?

What are the two disciplines that VAS theory based on?

List the three problems with VAS.   

Attachment:

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0272989X0102100408

please answer ALL questions with a unique text and do not put the answer in the picture :)

Answer 1

Ans.1

Pain- Pain is the most frequent experienced sensations. It is highly subjective experience that is caused by injury or disease and affects people in different ways depending upon the person’s emotional response to the unpleasant sensation in the particular body part or different body parts.

Types of Pain-

Chronic Pain- Chronic pain may be understood as pain that persist for more than 6 months. It is often regarded as the abnormal condition in which pain is no longer a mare symptoms of tissue injury, but in which the pain and pain behaviour by themselves the main disease processes.

Interaction between psychiatric and chronic pain- The psychiatrics and chronic pain are mutual efforts of pain management, where the symptoms of pain became behavioural problem, psychiatrics use the pain management system with the help of Primary care physicians or PCPs. Individuals with chronic pain often report that pain interferes with their ability to engage in occupational, social and recreational activities which is consistent with bio-psychosocial model of illness. Their inability may contribute to increased isolation, depressed mood and feeling of worthlessness. The psychiatric involve in pain management can help them to cure the symptoms and live healthy social and active life.

Ans.2

Visual Analog scale or VAS- Visual Analog scales are the type of rating scale, the rating scale works with hierarchy model and rank the outcomes. The VAS generally used as the method of measuring the preference of health outcomes.

Advantages of VAS-

·        VAS is useful in early step in the process of measuring preference.

·        Completing the VAS is easier than completing the other scale like SG and TTO.

·        VAS is useful to introducing health state and for obtaining ordinal preferences.

Disadvantages of VAS-

·        If anchors are not well defined, comparison between respondents may be problematic.

·        The VAS is not easier for respondent, it is an easier for implementer.

·        VAS approach contains some measurement biases.

·        The validity of reliability is not significant with compare to SG and TTO.

VAS Theory-

·        The one theory comes from the discipline of decision sciences.

·        The second theory belong to the discipline of Psychology.

Problems in VAS-

There are three main problems in VAS approach.

1.     Defined anchors with VAS- On comparison of individual and gropus, the VAS scale find problematic views.

2.     Measurement biases with VAS- Measure biases occur in VAS as the result of cognitive processes used by respondents on completing an instrument. These biases are (a) context bias, (b) end- aversion bias

3.     Result between VAS approaches and Classic approaches to utility measurements differ.