Quality of life measures cover a broad spectrum of personal and interpersonal functions and indicate how the person is coping with illness or other challenges to well-being. The available name evidence supports the benefits of obtaining a better understanding of this broadly conceived approach to quality of life than is implicitly present in the RDC/TMD Axis II screening assessment measures. However, it is not yet clear whether such measures are useful in a pragmatic sense to the clinician. The data are simply not in available, although quality of life measures seem most promising and are receiving attention in the literature. One excellent example is the Short Form-36 Survey (SF-36), which is a well-established measure (abbreviated versions of the same measure, SF-20and SF-12, are also available)with excellent psychometric properties that includes pain as an aspect of quality of life that is measured.