The American Pain Society went as far as copyrighting the phrase. But unlike the other vital signs — blood pressure, temperature, heart rate, and breathing rate — pain had no objective scale. How to ...

CHICAGO – Susan Leonard's rare and aggressive inflammatory breast cancer and treatment left her with swelling all over her body, nerve damage and loss of her hair, fingernails and toenails.

As a young doctor joining the "pain revolution," I probably asked patients thousands of times to rate their pain on a scale of zero to 10 and wrote many scripts each week for pain medication, ...

The way we measure pain is often on a scale from one to 10. How bad do you feel? It's not a perfect system. Pain is subjective, and one person's 10 could be another's three.

Patients should be able to use images and metaphors alongside traditional medical scales to describe their pain to doctors, a new study says. Share: Facebook Twitter Pinterest LinkedIN Email.