[The difficulty of pain-assessment in palliative care ESAS and MIDOS - measuring instruments with limited informative...

Palliative care provides care for seriously ill and dying people, often suffering from pain. Adequate pain treatment is therefore a main focus of the treatment team. Attempts are made to objectify the occurrence of pain using scoring systems such as ESAS or MIDOS. However, the difficulty of objectifying subjective conditions, such as the phenomenon of pain, is problematic and renders the scoring systems poor in content. Only through the complementary efforts of the treatment team, which can be found in the basic attitude of an open-minded recognition of states of suffering, can the best possible approximation to what can be understood as an intersubjective objectification of the pain event be achieved and ultimately the symptom burden be better reduced. However, without negating the difficulties that arise with the objectification of pain.