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On the off chance any pre-med folks or practicing physicians follow me: if you are gonna use the 1-10 pain scale in your future careers, please talk to me or another disability advocate first bc there's a couple things that healthcare providers aren't taught about pain scales!
These are some examples of pain scales that my doctors have used on me (the pediatric one I grew up with was the Wong-Baker faces one). In terms of communicating distress or of assisting accurate diagnoses, these pain scales were pretty much useless to me for a couple reasons.
First off: I have a LOT more experience with pain than the average patient. I grew up with chronic pain from a very young age, and I had a lot of very invasive procedures as a small child. This means that the "10" on the scale was useless to me.
Why? Well, pediatric patients are taught that the 10 should represent the worst pain you've ever been in. For me, that was getting my external fixator taken out when I was nine. That pain was extreme enough that nothing else I will experience will come close.
That means that I felt like I couldn't point to the numbers nine or ten on the pain scale ever again, bc I knew that, however much pain I was in, it could be WORSE. So even if I was in a lot of pain, I felt guilty pointing to the higher numbers.
This means that as a child, I gave my doctors a 6 on the pain scale for a broken bone and a 7 for an incision that split and reopened bc I didn't know any better.
This means that my doctors assumed that I was only in moderate pain, because I was very good at hiding my distress and I was pointing at faces towards the middle of the chart.
So my doctors would deprioritize pain management medications and additive devices in my treatment plans bc they were assuming that my 6 was the same as an able bodied kid's 6.
Spoiler alert: it wasn't, and not getting the pain treatment I needed as a child was suuuuuper distressing and traumatic. Things only got worse once I realized that I was underscoring my pain and tried to course correct.
Because once you go from marking lower numbers on the pain chart to saying higher numbers, most doctors and nurses will assume you are exaggerating, and will no longer believe that you are in real, serious pain 
This is especially true if the source of your physical pain is not immediately treatable or identifiable.
It's also suuuuuper frustrating for a doctor to ask a young patient to rate their pain and to hear that it's at "a twelve". That's not useful in diagnosis, and it's difficult for the doctor to interpret what that means beyond the patient wanting pain meds. :/
SO! For people who grew up chronically ilL AND their doctors, the current pain scale sucks and does a lot of harm. Thankfully there are other ways to gauge pain! My surgeon and I have come up with a separate system that has worked much better for us!
We use a chart that looks a lot more like this, where each number refers to a specific mental state/level of functioning with pain.
Before I even point to where my pain CURRENTLY is, we set baselines. For example, getting a sinus infection is a 2 on my scale, stubbing my toe is a 3, breaking a bone is a six or seven.
That way, when I say that I'm at a seven or an eight, my doctor understands the magnitude of my physical pain and is able to treat me accordingly without making me feel like I have to prove that I'm in pain.
I think it's also very important that pain scales measure distress over pure physical sensation bc not all types of physical pain are created equal. Focusing on distress centers the patient's experiences and helps give the patient a little bit more agency in their treatment
