The Chinese version of the Brief Pain Inventory (BPI-C) (Wang et al. 1996) was used to assess the multidimensional nature of pain, including pain sites, types and effectiveness of current pain treatment, pain severity and interference in the past 24 hours. Pain location(s) and the most painful site
were self-marked by participants on front and back body diagrams. Pain severity (worst, least, average and current pain) was rated from 1 (‘no pain’)–10 (‘pain as bad as you can imagine’). Each of the four items were used singly to represent pain severity, and then averaged to represent patients’ overall pain intensity. Types of current treatments or medications were elicited with an open-ended question and pain relief provided by them was rated from 0 (‘no relief’) to 100% (‘complete relief’).