If you've visited a doctor's office anytime in the past five decades, after you've had your blood pressure taken and your weight measured, you've probably been asked that seemingly innocuous question: "Are you in any pain?"
"Are you in any pain," and the 1-to-10 pain scale, have become part and parcel of American health care. But does it make sense to reduce pain to a yes-or-no binary, or a number on a scale? Haider Warraich, a physician and Harvard Medical School professor, says absolutely not. In his new book "The Song of Our Scars: An Untold Story of Pain," Warraich argues that modern medicine has "asked people to take the most complex experience they could ever have, one that fundamentally challenges the artificial distinction between the body and the mind, between the physical and the metaphysical, one that has emotional, spiritual, genetic, epigenetic, evolutionary, racial, and psychological dimensions, and reduce it to a single number on a 10-point scale."
