• Question: can human pain be measured?

    Asked by mollieet to Mike, Pip, Tianfu, Tim, Tom on 27 Jun 2012. This question was also asked by waldock.
    • Photo: Philippa Bird

      Philippa Bird answered on 27 Jun 2012:

      I don’t know. I guess you could look on an MRI scan of the brain, the one where bits of the brain light up to different degrees depending on what you are thinking or feeling.
      I have this dream of building a machine that records the exact feelings of pain a patient is feeling, and then can tell the doctor what disease the patient have by comparing the pain to the catalogue of known pain for known diseases. But I doubt that would ever happen.

    • Photo: Tom Lister

      Tom Lister answered on 27 Jun 2012:

      A measure of pain is pretty meaningless, as it can’t exactly be quantified. How much you feel something is based upon how many other things are going on around you, how scared you are, what you had for tea last night (not so much) and loads of other factors.

      What you really need to know, was how bad was the experience. Some pain can be good, and some bad. Women giving birth can feel fantastic or terrible, but under a similar amount of pain – there is a big fear thing there.

      We try to measure pain by asking patients to rate it on a 1-10 scale from ‘didn’t feel it’ to ‘the worst pain I could imagine’. What we are really doing there is measuring their feeling about the experience, but that’s of some use.

    • Photo: Tim Stephens

      Tim Stephens answered on 27 Jun 2012:

      I think that different people experience pain in different ways, so you can probably measure pain on yourself, but you won’t be sure whether someone else will feel the same pain if they had the same thing happen to them.

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