Defining the clinically important difference in pain outcome measures

By John T. Farrar, R. Portenoy, Jesse Berlin, J. Kinman, Brian L. Strom. Pain, 2000

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Clinical Effectiveness and Cost-Effectiveness of Treatments for Patients With Chronic Pain (2002, background): “6% would not reach the criterion of clinical significance—a 33% reduction.(43) Moreover, the data indicate that patients still continued to experience substantial pain severity after receiving the implant.”
Measuring acute postoperative pain using the visual analog scale: the minimal clinically important difference and patient acceptable symptom state (2017, neutral): “pain NRS in chronic pain conditions, with an MCID of 2 (comparable to VAS 20 mm).(13) 21 22 The MCID for the pain VAS was 14 in patients treated for shoulder rotator cuff disease,(26) and ranged”
Does Continuous Peripheral Nerve Block Provide Superior Pain Control to Opioids? A Meta-Analysis (2006, result): “Reductions in VAS scores of the magnitude observed in our study are consistent with values that have been suggested to be a clinically relevant reduction in pain scores (21,22).”
Pain assessment (2005, background): “As in VAS/GRS, a change on the NRS of 20% between two time-points of an assessment is regarded as being clinically significant [21, 22].”