Improving Numerical Measures of Human Feelings: the Case of Pain

The study acknowledges there remains differences between how people rate pain, just their approach is supposedly more accurate.

Yes one persons 6 might be another's 2 - and that score can be altered by the individual's pain threshold on the day or a person's life experiences of pain (one might have once rated their worst night ever migraine as the worst and very high on the scale until they have had a few episodes of cluster headaches and meh lets call that night a 6, maybe it was closer to 5 ... )

But almost always most people haven't got past pain as just pain and there in lies the biggest problem, pain isn't just physical pain, there's a mix of how much one is agitated / bothered, anxious / worried for themselves or others if whatever their problem goes south, how alert and cognitive they are / distressed and a couple other factors.

The other issue is the slope or gradient of the pain scores [3] which more often is overlooked by doctors and other medical professionals rendering assistance to diagnose and treat those in their care. Personally, mine is fairly steep.

Some robust links for older browsers -- The origin article (6th March 2025) [1] - which includes access link to full 18 page pdf paper. For a summary [2] medicalxpress article / summary

[1] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.03.05.25323444v... [1a] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.03.05.25323444v... [pdf]

[2] https://medicalxpress.com/news/2025-09-price-pain.html

[3] Not everyone ends up with a purely linear scale (for example high numbers on my scale a 9 is many times more painful than a 8, 8 is around 3 times more painful than 7 ... and so forth, however lower scores on my scale follow a more linear convention until 4 or so.) But for those who are fortunate to have a linear scale, their gradient isn't necessarily exactly 1 either.