Subjective pain meaning: the viewpoint of medical students and medical doctors

Physicians have particular relations to pain. They not only as specialists encounter other‘s pain every day, but also can suffer their own pain on some occasions. How they understand this phenomenon is related to their own ways of pain coping and to their reaction to the patients. In our research we tried to estimate how medical students and employed physicians, belonging to different generations and having different educational experience understand pain. The hypothesis was raised, saying that age, theoretical knowledge and working with patients experience can influence the meaning of pain. To test hypothesis Q methodology was used. 44 first year, 35 fifth year medical students and 32 placticizing physicians took part in our investigation and filled in “The Meaning of Pain Questionnaire”, which consisted of 92 different statements – variuos pain descriptions. These statements should reflect the meaning of pain created by Lithuanian culture, because they were collected using such sources: analysis of the Lithuanian literature about pain, individual interviews with 9 persons and material of 3 focus groups. Some statements from Aldrich and Eccleston (2000) questionnaire „Making sense of everyday pain“ were included as well. Statistical analysis was based on factor discrimination. 9 factors (accounts) were discriminated from the answers of participants in each group. It was inferred, that the subjective meaning of pain, which was constructed by medical students and employed physicians, is related to academival stage, education and experience of working with patients. Features of biomedical model are the most prominent at fifth’s year students’ descriptions of pain, a little bit less – at working physicians’, and much less – at first’s year students’ descriptions of pain. The most prevalent meanings of the pain are accounts such as “Pain as a natural, useful and educational sensation” and “Pain as an inseparable part of life”. Discriminated meanings of pain could promote better communication between specialists and patients, besides they create the basis fot trhe inference, that academical programs designed for medical students should include much deeper coverage of the biopsychosocial model of pain