An Analysis and Comparison of Widely Used Analogue Scales – VAS and Algometry

Abstract

Introduction: Humans have always experienced pain. Pain is defined as an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience which affects the quality of life and disturbs individuals’ day-to-day functioning. The instruments of measuring pain that are available nowadays include numeric, visual, analogue visual methods as well as the algometry-based method. Proper pain treatment plans and techniques can only be administered if accurate and correct diagnosis and measurements of pain are made. M aterial and Methods: There were 240 low back pain patients involved in the study. They were divided into two groups: 120 of them were treated on an outpatient basis, and the other 120 underwent health resort treatment. Pain measurements were made prior to and after the treatment with the use of the VAS and algometry. Results: In the study we found that the condition of the patients who received health resort treatment got much better compared to the condition of the patients who received outpatient treatment. As far the use of the measuring instruments is concerned, no differences were found between the VAS and algometry. There is no statistically significant correlation between the VAS measurements and measuring pain thresholds with the use of algometry.