Pain Scale

In “The Pain Scale”, Eula Biss discusses her thoughts on pain and the short comings of the pain scale. She presented several interesting reoccurring themes and ideas but the ideas that caught my interest were the comparison of the pain scale to other scales. She seems to use those other scales to express the short comings of the pain scale.

In the first section, she discussed how every scale has a zero point. She then discussed the zero point of the Kelvin temperature scale and compared it with the pain scale. She said that “Even at absolute zero, their motion does not stop completely. Even the absolute is not absolute.” (172) What the author seems to be saying is that like how there is no such thing as molecules with absolutely no movement, there is no such thing as not feeling pain.

 In the next section Biss talks about the Beaufort scale, a scale used to measure the wind. She talked about how the scale was organized. She said there were twelve categories. Each category has a title, a number, and a description. On the other hand with the pain scale you only have numbers. Only two of those numbers have labels: “No pain”, and “The worst pain imaginable”, which is subject to the limits of one’s imagination. This makes the whole pain scale very vague compared to the more well defined Beaufort scale.

The final scale discussed in the passage was the Wong-Baker Faces scale which is another pain scale. The only difference is that each number had an associated face with it. Biss then discusses about how emotional pain and physical pain are both interrelated, and even our words seem to reflect this: pain can refer to both physical and emotional hurting. This interrelation of emotional and physical pain makes the pain scale even more inaccurate since the number given by the patient can be skewed by how they’re feeling. This can pretty much render the whole scale useless since it will vary person by person even if they’re feeling the same amount of pain.

Biss showed that compared to other scales, the pain scale is perhaps the most useless scale due to the lack of concise fixed points, the lack of descriptions, and the fact that one’s emotions and experiences may interfere with someone’s response.