Online Seminar: 'Pain cannot (just) be whatever the patient says it is. A critique of a dogma.'

McCaffery’s famous assertion that “pain is whatever the experiencing person says it is, existing wherever he [or she] says it does”, is challenged by Charles Djordjevic in his 2023 paper: Pain cannot (just) be whatever the person says: A critique of a dogma. If Charles’ arguments are accepted, interesting and troubling questions must be addressed by nurses in practice and education. Within clinical environments, shorn of the certainty that accompanies McCaffrey’s dictum, nurse responses to patient reports of pain are complicated. Alternatively, in education, insofar as students need clear and unambiguous instruction, papers that question or undermine taken for granted assumptions and ways of working generate considerable problems for educators.

Ideally, arguments such as those presented by Charles should help set the stage for a more nuanced and realistic way of addressing and redressing the problem(s) of pain in the classroom and clinic. Yet it is not obvious how subtle and complex claims of the sort presented in this paper are to be integrated into the curriculum or patient care. In this seminar Charles Djordjevic outlines his critique of McCaffrey’s position on pain and nurse responses to patient reports of pain. Thereafter, Barabara Pesut, Mark Risjord, Abby Martin and Mar’yana Fisher respond to some of the difficulties and anomalies thrown out by work of this sort, and they tentatively proffer ways to assimilate such thought into nursing practice.