Pain is difficult to measure. One person’s simple “oh” can be the agony of another. But everything seems to change if we give it a price. By translating cash pain, a more accurate and comparable way of measuring suffering was created.
A dor has a price labelthanks to a new method that surpasses standard pain assessments.
If you have been hospitalized in a hospital, you are very likely to have asked you, “How would you evaluate your pain on a scale from zero to 10?” Although it is widely used, the limitations of this approach are well known and boil down to this: one person’s “10” is the “4” of another.
In a study in the November edition of Social Science & Medicinea new way of evaluating accurately – and more objective – the pain of people, and everything was to translate pain into something familiar to all: money.
“Our investigation proposes to transform money pain – not to market suffering, but to create a scale we can all share,” he explained, to, Carlos Alós-FerrerFull Professor of Economics at the School of Management of the University of Lancaster and corresponding author of the study.
It is central to have better pain measurement systems. Inaccurate measurements can lead to inadequate treatments of it; and economic losses unnecessary.
As New Atlas recalls, the overall cost of pain treatment is huge. In the US alone, the estimate is between $ 560 billion and $ 635 billion a year. This includes direct health and days/hours without work. Thus, the urgency of investigating a better measurement system is understood.
How much is your pain?
In the new study, three experiences were done with 330 healthy adults between 18 and 60 years. In one, the participants were exposed to light electrical pain; in another, the thermal pain; In the third, they received the same thermal stimulus but they were given to them or a placebo or painkillers.
In each experience, participants completed three standard pain scales for comparison: the numerical scale (0-10); the analog visual scale; and the overall scale of labeled magnitude (GLMS) – a tool where pain intensity is evaluated along a line with verbal anchors such as “no sensation” to “stronger feeling imaginable.”
Along with these pain assessments with traditional methods, researchers tested their “Monetary equivalence” method (ME).
Participants were repeatedly questioned if they would accept a certain amount of money to experience the same painful stimulus againor if they would prefer a smaller amount to avoid it.
Example: “Do you prefer to receive 15 euros and feel the pain again, or 10 euros and not feel pain?” The point where a participant changed “painless” to “pain” revealed about the “worth” pain to him in monetary terms.
Two versions of the ME1 method were tested, in which the questions were listed in increasing order of money (forcing consistency); and Me2, where the same questions were asked at a random way (allowing some inconsistency).
In all three experiences, the Monetary Methods (ME1 and ME2) surpassed Traditional scales in distinction between high and low pain conditions.
Even in the study with analgesic, monetary measures properly and significantly detected differences. This will have happened because participants expected the anesthetic to completely eliminate the pain, and when they did not, they evaluated their pain as higher. As scientists tell the New Atlas, “it is a psychological effect that the monetary method avoids“.
The approach worked me both for electrical and thermal pain, suggesting that it is not limited to a specific type of stimulus. In addition, it resulted even when participants did not know if they had received placebo or analgesic, showing that the method is resistant to psychological expectations.
Statistical analyzes showed “decisive evidence” that monetary methods predicted much better pain levels than standard methods.
Investigators admit, however, that this method has limitations; like the fact that money means different things for different people. For example, richer individuals can report higher “pain prices”.
The random assignment of the groups controlled this in the experiences, but the use in the real world would require adjustments.
