Because pain is so subjective, the pain scale was invented to help physicians understand how much a patient's pain interferes with his or her life.
This scale does not seem to be adequate to reflect the actual pain experienced, especially in women.
Evaluating the intensity of pain in a person is difficult and open to interpretation. Through several stories of severe pain related to endometriosis, Jeffrey Mogil, professor at McGill University, member of the QPRN and specialist in gender differences in pain perception, explains why pain perception between men and women is different. In addition to a societal normalization of pain in women, the tools available to evaluate the intensity of pain (scale of 1 to 10) do not allow to represent the real pain felt by women. This difficulty in apprehending the intensity of pain may have consequences on the way pain is perceived in society and in the health care setting.
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