I wasn’t going to waste my time with this but it’s bothering me so!
Let’s look at this tweet someone shared
This is actively harmful
The point of rating your pain on a scale of one to ten isn’t to find out How Much Pain your body is experiencing at the moment. It’s not, like, figuring out how many Gs your body is being exposed to. Pain is subjective. Duh.
The pain scale is not used to compare other people’s pain to each other’s. Why would it be? That would be silly and kinda useless (except maybe in times of extreme medicine shortage, I guess?) Like, it’s not “Well, this patient says they’re at a 2, this patient says they’re at a 7, so this patient gets pain meds and this one doesn’t.”
It’s to compare your pain to your pain. Both where your pain is in relation to what you feel you can handle, and where your pain is before treatment and aftertreatment.
How you gauge your pain is important for treating that pain. It doesn’t matter that another person might be able to handle the pain better and just need a ‘small’ pain med to handle that. Who fucking cares if the person in room 2102 could handle your pain with just Tylenol if you can’t? That’s irrelevant.
Even more, knowing where you’re pain is before treatment (say, a ten) to where your pain is after treatment (say, a 3) is crucial. That shows if the treatment is effective in reducing your pain. Otherwise, if your pain is at a ten before and after treatment—or a seven before treatment and has increased to a nine after treatment—there’s obviously an issue that needs to be addressed.
There’s also a really sloppy argument being made about how individuals manage pain in relation to each other that just… isn’t true. Someone who has a lot of experience with one type of pain may bear that same type of pain better than someone who doesn’t, yes. That’s often true. But other types of pain that they don’t experience often may feel just as ‘omg I’m fucking dying’. And someone who for one reason or another has in the past experienced a lot of pain but is no longer experiencing that pain in their day-to-day lives isn’t going to bear the pain better than someone who has experienced less overall pain but more recently.
And certain long-term illnesses can actually make the same thing more painful. Like, a cancer patient might interpret every little movement as excruciating pain. That happens, and it’s not because pain was rare for them before.
And here’s how it’s harmful: people are ashamed of their pain. Yes, even including Good Nobly Suffering Disabled and Chronically Ill People that this tweet is meant to acknowledge.
People in pain feel they shouldn’t complain, shouldn’t cry, shouldn’t ask for pain management because Someone Somewhere is hurting worse, Someone Somewhere is going through more, or they themselves have been through worse.
But pain is not felt nor treated in relation to other people’s experience of pain. What an ugly—and more hostile to people in pain!—world that would be.
If anything, the pain scale (and treating pain as a vital sign) helps protect patients, those who are dealing with chronic and acute pain.
Anyway! The pain scale works because of the criticized dynamic, not in spite of it. There’s so many good ways to acknowledge that people with chronic pain may experience pain differently, including underreporting pain, and encouraging people with chronic pain to not underreport pain because they can theoretically handle it without… This mess.
