Although pain is somewhat subjective, it is necessary for both parents and doctors to know the intensity and location of pain in children. It is not easy to know, because they still do not speak, because they do not know the vocabulary or because of some pathology that prevents them from telling us, but there are several tables or methods that can help us to measure our child's pain. Depending on your age, one or the other will be used.
In the case of premature babies or neonates, body language reactions (facial expression, body movements ...) and the alteration of vital signs (respiratory rate, blood pressure, sweating ...) are observed.
From the age of 3 you can know how much it hurts the child by showing him drawings with several faces, from the happiest to the saddest, and that he says with which face he identifies. In the same way you can use colors from white to black, white being nothing of pain and black, an unbearable pain. Since the little ones do not have enough vocabulary and sometimes they are afraid to respond to the doctor, it is easier to use these methods and tell the mother or dad. Ideally, they could tell us how it hurts, if it is a burning, stabbing, deep pain, in addition to specifying the area of pain, if there is irradiation, if it is continuous, etc. It also works to make a scale from 1 to 10 for the child to say in what number his pain is, or if he clicks, with what intensity.
The moment they are able to self-assess and tell us where it hurts and how, it is the first thing to pay attention to.
We all know what pain is, although we don't know how to describe it, finding the right method to evaluate our little one's pain will help us establish an effective treatment.
