On a scale of 1-10, how much does it hurt??
If you’ve ever been injured, medical and hospital staff will often ask you to rate your pain on a scale of ten. For little kids, they will use a frowny face to smiley face scale. When my daughter with special-needs was in the hospital, she preferred “small, medium, large, extra large.” This pain scale can be very helpful for people to demonstrate whether their pain is getting worse, staying the same, or improving. In the moment, it’s a very important tool.
In a personal injury case, the pain scale is often abused by defense attorneys and used as both a sword and a shield. If you rate your pain as a 2 out of 10, that might be significant to you, but months or years later, the insurance company might claim that is a very low amount of pain. If you say 10/10 pain, they will claim you are exaggerating.
The worst pain I have ever experienced was when a home-health nurse was jamming salt-covered paper down into a wound on my elbow. I had stupidly laid down my motorcycle at 75 miles per hour and ground my elbow down to the bone. For weeks, these nurses were battling infection with various techniques, including forcing silver and salt into the wound. To me, that is and will always be my own 10/10. But your 10/10 might be something different. Perhaps a giving birth, passing a kidney stone, or the 5 seconds after you stub your pinky toe on a table leg.
If you’ve been injured in an accident, it’s good to try to keep this in mind as you answer these questions. Intermountain health care has a pain assessment tool here https://intermountainhealthcare.org/ckr-ext/Dcmnt?ncid=528692275
This tool can give people some ideas on how to describe pain. If in your mind, a 2/10 pain level is extremely limited, make sure to tell your doctor that. Or if you can go to work, eat lunch, and drive home at a 10/10, be sure to keep that in mind.
In the pain assessement tool, it says that a 10/10 would mean that you can’t talk, text, or rest, and that you may cry out uncontrollably. By contrast, at a 2/10 on that scale, you are slightly aware of pain, but mostly don’t think about it.
Unfortunately, not everyone thinks about pain the same way, and that’s why I don’t believe these pain scales are useful to look back at months later to determine how much pain someone is it. So it’s a good idea that if you’ve been hurt in an accident, describe to the staff how the pain affects you. If you can’t go to work, say that. If you can’t sleep, say that. If the pain is so bad that you don’t want to talk to others, let them know. You are more than just a number on a page, but sometimes insurance companies want to reduce you to that.