How do you gauge your pain level from 1 to 10?

BirkiLady · ‎02-22-2015

No one has ever explained or showed a graph for pain on a scale of 1 to 10. I'm always at a loss of what to put! Curious how others judge their pain levels. The highest level I've ever put was a five (5), which is simply a guess! Does anyone have a specific way to explain this to me? Thanks.

Money screams; wealth whispers.

qualitygal · ‎10-04-2010

There is a picture of a face, that if you go type into Google, levels of pain for instance and the faces come up to show you 1-10. The doctor's offices usually have one in the exam room so you can see, but if not, check on Google. I found them there. HTH

grandma2pkmh · ‎08-04-2013

@BirkiLady To me I consider a 1 as barely noticeable, 5 as pain is pretty bad and 10 as give me morphine.

gizmogal · ‎05-09-2014

The scale is subjective. There is no explanation or definition. The idea is to give the medical professional a context for how YOU measure YOUR pain.

To doctors it’s generalized that 1 would be pain you hardly notice and has no interference with your activities or normal comfort. And 10 is understood as the worst pain you could ever endure, so bad it would incapacitate you and would be agonizing suffering. Now when you answer on that scale, they are asking: if you came in for treatment or diagnosis of a pain complaint, which end of the scale would it favor?

If you answer every inquiry as 5 arbitrarily or deciding to just “average” it without your interpretative thought, they’ll consider the pain fairly unremarkable. Not to ignore it, but not necessarily provoking a lot of testing.

So you have to evaluate pain as: is it much closer to the very low end, or much closer to the high end? 5 is a good answer if it’s really just in between. But 6-7 or 3-4 tells the physician much more, because they understand the scale is based on extremes, not the average between 1 and 10.

Pain is subjective, so tell them what you feel along your scale of what is endurable versus horrible and they’ll treat it more realistically. Kvetch is 1, torture is 10. You pick the number appropriate for your pain.