Objective pain score? Here’s the problem with that

By Laurenz Casser, Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow, University of Sheffield

Are you in pain? Are you sure? On a scale from zero to ten, where zero is no pain at all and ten is the worst pain imaginable, how much pain is it?

Invitations to rate your pain on some arbitrary scale of numerals, or on a display of smiley faces that range from happy to sad (if you’re a child), remain the standard ways of assessing people’s pain. If a doctor wants to know how much pain their patient is in, that’s how they’ll try to find out. And they do this for good reason: no one knows a person’s pain better than the person whose pain it is.

And yet, ratings like these…

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