New manifesto a “bill of rights” for patients in pain
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* Susan Pinker

*“You have a right to have your pain treated and the staff caring for you have an obligation to treat your pain.”* 

The Canadian Pain Society has created a Patient Pain Manifesto ([www.canadianpainsociety.ca](http://www.canadianpainsociety.ca)) for patients with surgical or treatment-related pain. Society President Celeste Johnston, a professor of nursing at McGill University, says it is needed because half of hospitalized patients experience moderate to severe pain unnecessarily. “People will simply recover faster if their pain is controlled,” says Johnston.

The society says patients often believe that suffering is simply part of the hospital experience and don't request medication. Many also think that pain is an index of healing, a macabre variant of the “no-pain, no-gain” maxim, or they expect hospital staff to intuit how much analgesic they need. Johnston says these facts point to the need for patient education. “Almost every effort in the past has been aimed at staff, and the effect has been very short-lived,” she says. “There really needs to be a partnership between patients and their families and health agencies. We want patients to understand that they have to work with staff to manage their pain.”

The society, which would like pain assessment to become medicine's fifth vital sign, is distributing the manifesto's basic tenets via a bookmark that will be distributed to hospital inpatients. Society members, primarily anesthetists, neurologists, nurses and psychologists, are trying to convince health workers and the groups representing them to take pain-rating scales as seriously as they would routine readings of blood pressure and body temperature.

![Figure1](http://www.cmaj.ca/https://www.cmaj.ca/content/cmaj/165/2/201.1/F1.medium.gif)

[Figure1](http://www.cmaj.ca/content/165/2/201.1/F1)

Figure. **Fighting for pain relief** Photo by: Canadian Pain Society