Algesimetry

A study of this effect of drugs needed the evolution of a reliable and reproducible method of algesimetry, and the pressure method eventually chosen was evaluated in over 1,000 subjects in order to determine the patient and operator variation,

In attempts to quantify pain (algesimetry), most experimental observations have been made on acute pain elicited from easily accessible, mostly cutaneous, structures.

This has spawned efforts to establish an 'objective' algesimetry, which does not require the report of subjective states but primarily assesses responses to noxious stimuli in the motor, autonomic, endocrine and central nervous systems.

The dilemma of experimental algesimetry can be characterized as follows. The more reproducible and quantifiable a method of experimental pain induction is, the more inadequate it appears as a model of clinical pain.

Experimental algesimetry is a rapidly expanding field of research, which can be expected to provide fundamental information about the nature of pain.

In Chapter 1 we sought to move the field of algesimetry past the categorical approach toward a dynamic, contextual model consistent with the pioneering work of Melzack and Wall (1965), Sternbach (1968), Fordyce (1976), and others.