Discomfort, pain and stiffness: what do these terms mean to patients? A cross-sectional survey with lexical and qualitative analyses
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: While pain is often the focus of clinical interventions, other clinical outcomes (e.g., discomfort, stiffness) might also contribute to patients' functionality and well-being. Although researchers and clinicians may view discomfort, pain and stiffness as different constructs, it remains unclear how patients perceive and differentiate between these constructs. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to explore patients' perceptions of pain, discomfort, and stiffness. METHODS: Chiropractic patients were invited to complete an online cross-sectional survey and describe what 'discomfort', 'pain' and 'stiffness' meant to them using their own words. Lexical and inductive qualitative content analyses were conducted independently and then triangulated. RESULTS: Fifty-three chiropractic patients (47.2% female, mean age: 39.1 ± 15.1 years) responded. The most common combinations of words to describe discomfort were "can be ignored" and "less severe than". "Cannot be ignored" and "sharp shooting" were used to describe pain. "Limited range of motion" was used to describe stiffness. Qualitatively, five themes were developed: impact, character, feeling, intensity and temporality. Stiffness was described as limited movement/mobility. Although discomfort and stiffness impacted patients' activities, patients remained functional; pain was described as stopping/limiting activities. Discomfort was described as dull and tingling, pain as sharp and shooting, and stiffness as tight and restricted. Patients felt displeased and annoyed when experiencing discomfort and stiffness but hurt and in danger of harm when experiencing pain. Discomfort and stiffness were described as less intense than pain, with shorter/intermittent duration; however, all constructs could be experienced constantly. CONCLUSION: Patients perceived discomfort, pain and stiffness as different, yet overlapping constructs. This preliminary work advances our knowledge of how patients conceptualize these constructs, contributing to better understanding of what patients mean when reporting these experiences, potentially improving the clinician-patient communication.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".