Just to claify, I'm just mildly bemused by this, I'm not actually up in arms about it, so by all means help me to clarify it but don't act like I'm trying to destroy the NHS or anything (I know AIBU can be brutal at times).
I have never understood when medical professionals ask me to rate my pain on a scale of 1-10 what the scale is actually suppposed to correspond to. I know that pain is subjective, but even so I would really appreciate some guidance as to what level of pain goes with what number. I mean, if I'm only supposed to used integers (because it would seem a bit picky to say 3.72 or whatever), then 1-10 isn't giving me a lot of leeway to distinguish between types of pain.
I'm assuming that 0 is supposed to mean no pain at all, and 10 is the worst pain imaginable: excruciating near-death agony, e.g. crucifixion (suffocating, nails through hands and feet, deep lacerations elsewhere, emotional pain etc).
Ok, so I would rate my first experience of childbirth at about a 6 at its peak, going down to maybe a 4 at times. It was an awful, long, labour resulting in a forceps and ventouse delivery without pain relief and with a large episiotomy. And I was hooked up to machines for over 30 hours so not allowed to move positions. It was by far the worst pain I have ever been in. But I can't put it on a level with hours and days of physical and emotional torture until actual death which I see in cases of abuse on the news, for example. So even though I personally have never been in worse pain, so it would be a '10' on my own experience, it would seem stupid of me to use up a 10 on that when there are clearly worse pains out there. And it was only physical pain, I had emotional support.
Another experience of childbirth was more straightforward, although still the second worst pain of my life. I would put it at about a 4, in that it was by a very long way less painful than the bad labour, but still terrible. But if I said 4 when they asked where it was on 1-10, they seem to assume that means that it's not too bad, in that I still have numbers 5-10 that it could be, but that just seems ridiculous because how could childbirth, even at its absolute worst, ever be comparable to the worst pain it is possible for a human to suffer? Obviously I didn't have the energy or inclination to have that argument at the time, I could barely speak at all, but over all the pain that was what I was thinking.
So that means I've got numbers 1-3 to play with for all other pains that are less than childbirth. I've had various infections and illnesses over the years, thankfully none too serious. But there are definite degrees of how painful they are, from 2 day migraines and third-degree burns to gastroenteritis (very unpleasant, but in waves) and milder headaches.
This scale just doesn't seem to make sense at all. There's massive uneven jumps in between numbers. You have to squeeze almost every type of pain from mild to severe into 1-3 so that you have enough numbers left for the really agonising torture. How could I go above 3 when I can see things in the news which are clearly so much worse? But on the other hand if I tell a health professional that it's a 3, the assumption is that's it's barely any pain at all, because, you know, it seems to sound like 30% pain, and that sounds low.
Has anyone ever seen any actual NHS advice on this? I would really like a chart where the average experience of different illnesses were ranked on this 1-10 scale. What I would really like is for them to use a wider ranging scale, say 1-100 or 1-1000. But given that the 1-10 things seems very widespread, what I'd like as a compromise is proper guidance on what the numbers are supposed to correspond to IRL.