Number Scales

Whenever I go to the doctor for anything involving pain, they require a statement of how bad the pain is "on a scale of one to ten." This drives my brain up the wall every time for the five seconds before I answer.

I have to calculate two things: 1) how much pain I'm in, and 2) what to translate that to for the sake of the doctor.

If you just think about that for a minute, the problem should be obvious. The metric system exists so that, albeit with some conversions, any general physical measurement can be expressed in universally recognizable terms. Doctors do the same with understanding their patients' subjective conditions via the pain scale. However, the key word here is "subjective."

For starters, it's a principle of philosophy that every individual's "feelings" are unique, and nobody knows exactly how another feels any sense or emotion. Therefore it is impossible to convey pain felt with complete accuracy (by corollary, the number scale may be the best we can get, but that doesn't lessen its flaws). Then to ensure adequate communication the patient would ideally have to know their doctor on a personal level, to be familiar with how they would interpret the information. Likewise the doctor should know their patient and how they would rationalize the formulation of their rating, taking into account their pain tolerance, if they're the type who never give the highest rating out of acknowledgement that it could be higher, etc.

Unfortunately these tend to be mere guesswork (if given any thought at all), and the combined displacement from both parties carries the potential for misunderstanding. It's not likely to cause improper treatment; but it always occurs to me that I may be giving rather groundless information because I have no idea what others typically feel in such a condition, don't know what "the most pain I could endure" is, and so on.