The part about pain isn’t actually necessarily true. When I was recovering from surgery, they would ask “on a scale of 1-10, with 10 being the worst possible pain, how much pain are you feeling?” I imagined how excruciatingly bad the worst possible pain would be and rated my pain a 2. When my pain went up to a self-reported 3, the nurses were surprised to find me crying from the pain...
That's the exact point the author was making with this example. A doctor cannot normalize pain ratings across patients, and has to rely on each patient scoring their own pain relative to their own experiences. Your 2/10 could be 7/10 for someone else - all that matters is that you have a measurement stick to compare pain for yourself, so that medical staff know that your 3/10 is more than your 2/10.
The problem is that my 2/10 is rather distressful and doctors assume it isn't, because they assume that self-reported pain ratings map consistently to subjective levels of distress across patients.
Comments
The part about pain isn’t actually necessarily true. When I was recovering from surgery, they would ask “on a scale of 1-10, with 10 being the worst possible pain, how much pain are you feeling?” I imagined how excruciatingly bad the worst possible pain would be and rated my pain a 2. When my pain went up to a self-reported 3, the nurses were surprised to find me crying from the pain...
Not everyone interprets the scale the same way...
That's the exact point the author was making with this example. A doctor cannot normalize pain ratings across patients, and has to rely on each patient scoring their own pain relative to their own experiences. Your 2/10 could be 7/10 for someone else - all that matters is that you have a measurement stick to compare pain for yourself, so that medical staff know that your 3/10 is more than your 2/10.
The problem is that my 2/10 is rather distressful and doctors assume it isn't, because they assume that self-reported pain ratings map consistently to subjective levels of distress across patients.