If you’ve ever been in the hospital recovering from a surgery, you know the health care providers will ask you to “rate” your pain on a scale of 1 to 10, so they can administer pain relief ...

To show for it, he has two filing drawers packed with pain scales, past and present. It includes everything from mood scales, to depression scales, to coping scales to side effects. Some are verbal, ...

So if today's pain scale isn't working well for patients and doctors, what's the alternative? Many health care providers are trying to come up with a system that involves words, not numbers.

and memes." Here's a little more background: "These networks have created their own 'alternative pain scales' that measure 'social over physical aspects of pain that are often unacknowledged in ...

urgent-care centers, and doctors’ offices adopted it as a sort of better-than-nothing shorthand, and it continued to spread. “There are no language barriers with the numeric pain scale ...

Patients are used to answering a health care provider's question, "On a scale of one to 10, where does your pain rate?" What exactly do those numbers mean? Dr. Diane Flynn, a primary care pain ...

During another visit, she recalls rating the severity of her pain at a 10 on a 10-point scale ... Far from healing pain’s gender gap, the health care system appears to be making it worse.

Asking patients in the emergency room to rate their pain on a visual scale or to rank it from zero ... etc)," DeVine told Reuters Health by email. "As physicians, the actual number used to ...