Hi jarrett622

On reading your posting above I was just on the point of agreeing with your sentiments entirely when I realised you have (to my mind) contradicted yourself with the above quoted extract.
Whilst no one should ever judge a persons pain – and boy just like you have I had to put up with a lot of that – at the same time no pain should ever be gauged by using a so called pain scale. Your idea of 1-10 is almost certainly not mine because you may faint on my 9 or I may faint on your 7. Some folk here in the past have quoted the Mankoski pain scale http://shsskip.swan.ac.uk/Informatio...in%20Scale.htm which perhaps we could all embrace but I am not too happy with that idea. Many people will still exaggerate their pain while others will try to play theirs down.

I have tried until I am blue in the face to get both my GP and current neurologist (not to mention relatives!) to accept the level of pain in my feet but none want to understand and on one recent occasion my neuro told me to remember there were others worse than me. Now that really made me feel good.

Tony[/QUOTE]

That's what I said. I didn't contradict myself at all. Everyones pain differers. And that's what I said. The scale is still a valid tool in that I may rate a pain at 6 and you may rate it at 2. What this tells the doctor is what we, as individuals, are feeling at that moment. This tells him what kind of treatment is needed and at what level.

I'm confused. I think you have lumped my post in with the person that responded to me. I don't see a contradiction in my post. Here's my post in it's entirety:

Part of the problem in defining pain is that we all feel pain differently. A type or level of pain that might drive me crazy may be barely felt by you. In nursing school they couldn't pound it in hard enough: Never ever judge a person's pain. If they say they're in pain, they are. As to how bad that pain is, falls under what I stated above; we all feel pain differently. The rating scale still in use, 1-10 usually, is actually very effective for rating pain. Chronic pain, too, can range from 1-10, varying on different days. What seems to befuddle doctors is when we have a pain that they can't point to a specific injury as a cause. For someone like me where they haven't found an underlying illness I'm sure they wonder how much of it is just in my head. I'd like to, for just one of my worse nights, let them experience the pain and discomfort I deal with. *Then* they would 'get' it. I hate it when the doctor acts like I'm simply imagining the pain. "Oh, you can't be feeling that. There's no physical reason for you to be feeling pain." Yeah, right. Tell it to my feet.