THE ACCURACY OF MEMORY FOR PAIN - NOT SO BAD MOST OF THE TIME

Although the clinical treatment of chronic pain syndromes requires systematic assessment of pain (based to some extent on patients' self-reports), it has become common to question the accuracy of autobiographical and retrospective accounts of pain severity. The authors' work suggests that self-reports of pain are generally accurate. In a research program sponsored by the National Center for Health Statistics, the authors found that the only influence on the accuracy of pain reports that could be documented empirically was pain at the time of recall on remembered pain episodes. With this exception, unreliability in pain self-reports may not be as attributable to the limitations of human memory and biases of self-report as generally assumed.