The numbers are irrelevant. It’s just an arbitary scale.
If you were experiencing a pain that’s so mild it’s basically just a feeling of discomfort, you’d be able to describe that, right? And you it you were experiencing a pain so intense that it has you literally screaming? You’d be able to describe the difference between them, right? Well there’s literally a conversion chart that translates those feelings into numbers.
You don’t have to conceptualise anything — it’s literally printed on a paper for you when they ask you the question. As long as you can experience pain and either read a description of pain severity, or describe your pain severity to someone who can read, you can use a numerical pain scale.
Maybe this varies from country to country, but IME the mapping of descriptions to numbers isn’t clear, which makes it hard to give a good response. At best, they’ll pull out something like this.
Well yes but you get folks who see that and can imagine worse pain so they say it’s a 9 instead of a 10 or who just can’t really tell what a 5 feels like
The numbers are irrelevant. It’s just an arbitary scale.
If you were experiencing a pain that’s so mild it’s basically just a feeling of discomfort, you’d be able to describe that, right? And you it you were experiencing a pain so intense that it has you literally screaming? You’d be able to describe the difference between them, right? Well there’s literally a conversion chart that translates those feelings into numbers.
You don’t have to conceptualise anything — it’s literally printed on a paper for you when they ask you the question. As long as you can experience pain and either read a description of pain severity, or describe your pain severity to someone who can read, you can use a numerical pain scale.
Maybe this varies from country to country, but IME the mapping of descriptions to numbers isn’t clear, which makes it hard to give a good response. At best, they’ll pull out something like this.
Well yes but you get folks who see that and can imagine worse pain so they say it’s a 9 instead of a 10 or who just can’t really tell what a 5 feels like