"The Pain Scale"

Eula Biss, a contemporary non-fiction writer, presents the audience with “The Pain Scale,” a piece written to provoke the reader’s definition of pain. The pain scale was created in the 1970’s as an attempt to improve patient care. Those in need were asked to rate their pain on a scale of zero to ten, where zero represents no pain, and ten being the worst pain imaginable. However, we must ask ourselves, what is pain?

 Is there an overall definition of pain? What I feel as pain, another person can feel the complete opposite.   For example, in the piece, Biss argues that a person can define death from starvation as relief, rather than dying a slow painful. After reading “The Pain Scale” several times, I agree with Biss that pain is subjective. There is no way to have a scale that measures pain because we all have different tolerances. If a child fell and scraped my knee, I would consider my injury to be a mild pain. I agree that, like Biss states, pain is one of the things that can only be measured through symbolic language.

But really, what is pain? I consider pain to merely be a sensation. Whenever I am in pain, I find something intriguing to do, which makes me forget that I am supposed to be hurting. Based on experience, many people do not realize that Icy Hot, Biofreeze, and other “pain relieving” gels cause feelings of hot and cold in quick intervals, which make us temporarily forget about the “pain” we were in before.

Throughout the entire piece, Biss forces us to rethink our definition of pain. In some ways, I agree that the pain scale is unnecessary because we are trying to measure our pain in a rational manner, but is it really accurate? On the other hand, I support those in the medical field that try to relate to the patient as much as possible. Then again, are the employees who work with the patients trying to make themselves feel better emotionally because they can potentially have to inflict more pain, in an attempt to improve the patient?

                I know I sound fickle; however, I believe that Biss’ piece was not meant to confuse us, but rather to have us think. The tone throughout the entire passage is solely thought-provoking. For example, the author states many things such as, the chicken’s pain was “zeroed,” but what is zero? She continues with zero being a number, as Christ was to a man. Although she makes many valuable arguments, I was very interested with the argument that all of our pain is different. Yet, we must notice how Biss tends to volley between support and opposition of the pain scale, which I believe causes us to dig deeper. Therefore, in my opinion, at the end of the day, pain will probably be one of the things we will never understand fully.