Describing Pain

Take a moment to increase your pain vocabulary

It’s been said that the Inuit have over a hundred words to describe snow. Linguists use the number to explain something significant about how we see the world. The Inuit and Eskimo encounter snow much more frequently than the average Spanish or English speaker, therefore they would describe it with more words. But it also gives insight into our life experiences. When an Inuit sees snow, he sees more than you or I do. Same snow, more meaning.

And so it is with medicine and pain. We see a bunch more pain than the average everyday Joe. We learn to evaluate pain more deeply and we understand more about it. It stands to reason that we would have more words to describe pain.

Most of us are pretty efficient at evaluating pain. We push, we prod, we ask our OPQRST questions and we get an idea about what’s going on. But sometimes we come up short when it comes to describing what we’ve found. When it’s time to hand off to another medical provider we can have those moments when our palette of pain words run dry.

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