on a scale of one to ten

Sorry - pressed send too soon.

Also, these aren’t designed to get an absolute measurement of pain, but rather to assess how the pain is impacting on someone’s quality of life. If somebody is more tolerant of pain and it’s something is not interfering with their everyday life, they may need less intervention than someone whose pain stops them doing their normal things.

That chart is helpful, thank you twiglet but I still think its an odd way of measuring pain. On the other hand - no I can't think of any other way either.

When I had cellulitis in my leg last year, I remember saying to my husband "Give me childbirth any day." I've never known pain like the cellulitis pain. It was certainly way above 10.

Plevey08

Equally annoying is how do you rate our customer services on a scale 1-10. Or star's 1-5. I sometimes don't mind giving it but then they want a great long box filling exercise of why etc etc...and you've only bought a pair of b....y socks. Sorry gone off piste here!

Totally agree with this!
😡😡

Coppernob

When I had cellulitis in my leg last year, I remember saying to my husband "Give me childbirth any day." I've never known pain like the cellulitis pain. It was certainly way above 10.

I’m not convinced that we can make the correlation with pain to childbirth.
Giving birth is productive (mostly) so somehow we tolerate it,
with aids, gas and air, pethidine, whatever is available, yelling and cursing, threatening and pleading, falling out with God and husband, all tolerated.
Once the baby was plopped I forgot how angry and cut I was.

I cannot imagine passing stones as you brave ladies have. I could not do that quietly, for sure.

I have had migraines which felt as though my head was breaking in two, the pain was terrible, an absolute 10.
Toothache, abscess, nine and a half, my goodness, holding
the heavy carving knife handle ready to bash it out!

Did you know, redheads have a much lower pain threshold than
blondes and brunettes.

I'm a redhead, or rather I was, now more white than red, and have always been told I have a very high pain threshold.

Even those with documented injuries like osteoarthritis feel pain differently. My mother found her arthritis excruciating but the damage to the joints was far less than another patient whose damage on the X-rays was significant and he should have been screaming in pain. Mum said her pain was an 8, he said his was a 4! I find it very difficult to say.

Coppernob

I'm a redhead, or rather I was, now more white than red, and have always been told I have a very high pain threshold.

Coppernob, perhaps you are the
“exception which proves the rule”

but wouldn’t you know yourself?

whenever i have been asked this, i just say, it hurts, it does not matter what the bloody number is.

My scale has three points:
Annoying but no paracetomol
Paracetomol needed
Paracetomol not taking it away!!!

I’m so glad to see this chart.
I’ve been having constant but varying levels of aches/pain in my head/neck/arm/shoulder for the last 3 months. After self referring to the NHS physio I got a phone call from a woman physio I’d never met.
After asking me various questions , including the pain scale (on which I vastly underrated myself) she said
1. I wasn’t urgent,
2. it could be 8 weeks before I was seen, and
3. I may have to accept that I had to learn to cope with chronic pain .

I ended up in the GP’s surgery 2weeks later after a call to the doctor that morning. She cld feel the inflammation in my neck and prescribed anti inflammatories. Then, very surprisingly, I got a call later that afternoon to say a cancellation had been found for a physio the next day. Thankfully not with the one who had spoken to me.
I would add that the affected arm is my only working arm as the other is mostly paralysed.
I’ll definitely be more able to answer the pain scale question next time I’m asked. Oh, and the anti inflammatories definitely helped.

Thigh cramp has me screaming and begging for mercy from a God I don’t even believe in and I’d class it as ten Childbirth I would rate at about three or four, gallstones at about eight. An old friend described thigh cramp as the worst pain she’d ever experienced and I didn’t really believe her—-until I had it for the first time two weeks later!

Suzieque66

OMG .. Ive just been diagnosed with Gall stones and the pain is terrible ... I did some research on google and found that a Fat Free diet is very beneficial for this condition... no doctor said anything about food being in the equation .... When I switched to this diet I am pain free ... Hope this helps other people who are in pain ...

Hi Suzieque66,
I had my Gall Bladder removed in 2020 after a year of Gallbladder attacks.
Keep off the fat to keep away the pain.
Also AppleCider Vinegar helped me although it doesn't help everyone.

I have chronic pain. Getting on for a decade now. I've been asked this ridiculous question and now I just do a gallic shrug. Impossible to say. My pain is mine, it has got worse each year. Impossible now to say any number. I'm used to it, I can't put a number on it and don't try.

I also get annoyed with, new, to me, doctors asking me what I expect them to do.

I had three childbirths with only gas and air - 10 at the time but soon forgotten. Gallstones - yes definitely a 10 and frightening before I knew what was causing it. But right up there is also treading on a weaver fish in shallow sea water some years ago. I thought at first I had trodden on a broken bottle but the pain just got worse and worse especially once I was out of the numbing effects of the cold water. I tried to walk back up the beach but collapsed in a heap, moaning ‘don’t touch me, don’t touch me)….full histrionics! I feel embarrassed thinking about it now. Instant relief was gained by the lifeguard on duty immersing my foot in a bucket of hot water, he had seen it before thankfully.

The chart is very useful. I hadn't thought of 10 being enough to knock you out.

Different people have different pain thresholds though, so a 6 to one person would be a 7r 8 to someone else.

It's a crude way off assessing pain but I don't think there's anything better.

Didn't mean to put an emoji in there.....

I had a staghorn kidney stone it was 3cm!
I couldn’t have surgery as I had ecoli so they tried blasting and using a stent.

When I was in the hospital a kind doctor had experienced the same, she gave me a pain management machine that delivered morphine in small doses rather than 4 hourly doses.
She said nobody could understand the pain unless they had experienced it.

I really wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.

Sago

Kidney stones……I couldn’t even begin to tell you!

When I went into hospital with suspected kidney stones, I told the doctor that the pain was worse than childbirth - that, apparently, was the clincher!

With my hip dislocations recently I told the paramedics 25, morphine was most welcome.

My crumbing vertebrae pain feels like 10/11/12 at times, but realistically I suppose it's about 8 or 9 most days. But, apart from taking pain killers, I can luckily get quite fast relief from simply lying flat for a while. It's a bit tricky doing this in public though.
I feel sorry for kidney/gall stone sufferers. It sounds awful.

henetha I know your pain as I my lumbar vertebrae are crumbling too and it never goes away does it? I'd have said its a 7 as its always there grumbling away in the background.
Now and again, possibly when something else crumbles (I've stopped asking) the pain escalates to a screaming 10 for a few days until it subsides back into a grumble.
Now I have a head full of pain that screams for a few hours, three or four times a day and only relents if I lie down for 30 or 40minutrs.
It can't be described aas a 1 to 10.

But I'm going to cut out that list and ask my GP if she uses such an aid to pain herself.

I can add another high ranking pain to the list, and it's shockwave therapy on your foot for plantar fasciitis. It's supposed to hurt to some degree but for some reason, when he touched the machine on my foot and switched on I went through the roof! Never have I felt pain like that, why I don't know, but he had to stop after about 2 seconds of hearing me scream.

Surely 10 is being burnt alive, childbirth is 7,8,9 and the rest you have to guess! Even severe pain in ordinary life probably doesn't go above 7/8 surely?

undines

Surely 10 is being burnt alive, childbirth is 7,8,9 and the rest you have to guess! Even severe pain in ordinary life probably doesn't go above 7/8 surely?

Speak for yourself - I can only say that I cannot imagine anything more painful than my kidney stones. If I'd been asked to rate the pain, it would have been off the charts. I've got a pretty high tolerance for pain, but that was unreal - I couldn't move, couldn't speak, could hardly breathe with the pain. So for me, it was far far more than a 7 or 8, even a 10!