so, pain scales, right.

they sound easy enough. rate your pain on a scale of 0-10 to describe how severe it is.

except pain is highly subjective. and pain scales are an utterly useless tool when used to evaluate a person's pain, or to compare pain between different people.

me rating my pain a 7 doesn't mean that pain is more severe than another person's 5, because there are a trillion different criteria you can use to arrive at that number.

you can rate pain by how much it distracts you. or by how much it impairs your movement.

or by how much you want to chop a limb off. or by how sick it makes you feel. or by how much painkillers you need to get through.

so it is absolutely pointless to try to use pain scales to gauge how debilitating pain is, or how likely it is that something is dangerously wrong.

pain scales have one, and only one useful application: to help someone keep track of the severity of their pain.

if I rate my pain a 3 and you yours an 8, fuck knows why has more pain, but I know that when I'm at an 8 that is a lot worse than when I'm at a 3.

so please stop trying to compare or evaluate anything from outside with a pain scale. it is completely pointless, has been proven not to work in emergencies, and if you don't know what criteria anyone uses to rate their pain, it communicates absolutely no information.