Have you been asked by a doctor or nurse to rate your pain on a scale of 0 to 10 – with 0 meaning no pain at all and 10 indicating the worst pain you can imagine. Chances are you have. The rating system has become a routine part of care.
But many doctors and nurses say this rating system is too simplistic and isn’t working, reports NPR's Patti Neighmond.
"I never look at just the pain scale," says Dr. Chrystina Jeter, an anesthesiologist and pain management specialist with UCLA Health in Southern California.
Now health care providers are trying to come up with a system that involves words, not numbers. Using words to describe pain brings greater specificity to the measurement of pain and can help focus care so it’s more effective.
If you’re in pain, try a metaphor, describe the course of your day and talk about how pain interferes with what you’d like to be doing.
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Wren Vetens thought she'd figured out a great plan to make her gender-confirmation surgery affordable.
She chose a doctoral program in physics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a school that not only embraced transgender students like her, but also granted insurance coverage for her gender-confirmation surgery when she enrolled in 2016.
But things got complicated in a hurry. An online price estimate put the cost at $19,000-$25,000. The hospital's billed price to her insurer was $91,850. Vetens and her mom soon felt they had been "the victims of a bait-and-switch scam."
Read more in the latest story in our Bill of the Month series, a collaboration between NPR and Kaiser Health News.
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You find a tick on your scalp or maybe somewhere below the belt.
What are the chances that the tick’s bite will have infected you with bacteria that cause Lyme disease?
The odds range from zero to roughly 50 percent. The exact probability depends on three factors: the tick species, where it came from and how long the tick was feeding, NPR’s Paul Chisholm reports.
Your Shots editor, Scott Hensley
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