Measuring pain in the clinic

This review identifies common methods used to assess subjective reports of chronic orofacial pain in adults. Several issues in pain assessment are identified which highlight the complexity of the apparently simple task of asking subjects how much they hurt. Recent applications of psychophysical methods to chronic orofacial pain assessment are emphasized since they provide interesting new methods which can be used for analysis of pain and analgesic processes and which can improve the reliability and validity of clinical pain reports.