this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2024
450 points (98.5% liked)
Ausome Memes
547 readers
5 users here now
A community for memes and humorous images that may be appreciated by autistic people, not necessarily autism-related memes.
Instance description for federated visitors
Rules
- Follow instance rules
- Please use the Lemmy cross-post option when applicable
- No political memes.
- Rules may adapt as the community grows.
founded 4 months ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
When I was in an ambulance for an injury, the EMT asked me to rate my pain from 1 to 10. I said I didn't know, because I have no frame of reference (because the whole concept of trying to rate pain objectively is stupid, but I didn't say that).
He said just rate it anyway. I said 4. He said, "okay, there's no way it's 4" and dropped it.
Based on these descriptions, it was way higher than 4.
It's not about having an obective answer to your pain levels, that's impossible since everybody experiences pain differently.
I worked in the hospital for some time and it was my task to protocol those pain tables every day.
At least where I worked the point of it was to have visualisation of the patients pain development over time.
For example patients comes in and gives a 8 on the scale. He gets an operation and gives a 6 afterwards, after a week he gives a 5 but in the next week he gives 7 again - this development could tell us something about the healing process, maybe there's an infection that would've slipped by if we didn't see this unusual rise in pain levels.
Still seems dumb to dismiss a patient's self-assessment like he did.
Yeah I wasn't answering to your anecdote, just trying to illuminate the purpose of those charts and that their rating is inherently subjective.
Obviously being dismissive about it is not productive.
Although there were times where we asked patients to reassess them, almost always when their answers were in the high end of the scale, a dude sitting totally chill drinking tea answering '10' is not really believable and could cloud what's happening. I mostly described it as "1 being a mild inconvenience and 10 being the strongest pain you have ever felt in your life"