Eula Biss' "The Pain Scale"

The pain scale, in my opinion, is simply not a reliable measurement of pain.  Pain is a subjective feeling and every single person feels pain differently, because most people have different tolerances.  As Biss states, "He was never impressed by my bleeding cuts or even my weeping sores." Biss is referencing her father, a physician, who believed that "most pain is minor." However, I'm sure many doctors see patients with bleeding cuts and weeping sores who, when asked to rate their pain on a scale from one to ten, would rate their pain a ten.  Does this seem to us to be a bit exaggerated? Absloutely.  Yet, who are we to judge the intensity of pain another person is feeling?  Pain cannot be shared or transferred, so the only person who truly knows how bad the pain is is the person who is experiencing it.  

Along with my thought that the pain scale is not reliable, I also believe it to be completely unnecessary. It seems like such a waste of time to try to explain to a patient how to rate the pain that they are feeling when they should be just focusing on how to fix the problem.  The real question is if the patient is experiencing pain or not.  I understand that this question also poses a problem, because how can we define the concept of pain.  The reality is that, most likely, people can distinguish between feeling pain and not feeling pain.  I know that when I have been sitting in a doctor's office and I have been asked to rate my pain, I tend to just say that it either hurts or it doesn't hurt at all.  The fact of the matter is, the doctor really just needs to know if the patient is feeling any pain, not really to the exact extent to which the pain is being felt.  I intend to become a doctor, and to me, it seems like a total waste of time to try and identify the patient's pain on a scale in the process of trying to relieve them of their pain.  For the most part, if a person is coming to see a doctor or a specialist, they are experiencing some degree of pain that is forcing them to be seen.

I found Eula Biss' "The Pain Scale" to be very interesting, because it sparked a lot of thoughts in me as I was reading.  This type of reading is what makes the wheels of our minds revolve.  Many confusing topics and correlations are discussed which force the reader to go to a new realm of thinking, so to speak, in order to understand the point of the reading.