this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2025
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There's some attempt to try and make it genuine, and there are guidelines around it to support that (e.g. 1 = barely noticeable, 3,4 = distracting, 5,6 = unignorable, 7,8 = prevents normal activities, 9 = prevents conversation)
But in practice you're going to get about one in every dozen patients who engages with this scale in good faith and you're going to get a number between 8-11 from everyone else.
I’ve never been able to properly conceptualise converting the pain I’m feeling into a 1-10 scale.
It just doesn’t make sense to me
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.