Objective pain score? Here’s the problem with that

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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...