REAL LIFE NEWS: MEASURING PAIN OBJECTIVELY
by Hazed
How do you measure pain? Until recently, the only way was to ask people to tell you how much something hurt, by ranking pain on a scale of 1 to 10, and by observing the way they behave.
This is not very reliable because different people react to pain in different ways. There’s no recognised universal scale that everyone agrees on, which makes measuring pain in an objective manner tricky.
Besides, sometimes patients are incapacitated and not capable of reporting their levels of discomfort.
But neuroscience has come to the rescue with the discovery that you can gauge how much physical pain someone is feeling by looking at a brain scan. Neuroscientists from several American universities have used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to identify objective measures of pain.
There’s a lot more work to do before this method can be used in a clinical setting but it’s a breakthrough that shows what may come in the future.
Source: http://io9.com/scientists-succeed-in-objectively-measuring-pain-472456061