I think it's great to bring more measures of pain to bear on things but admit I'm disturbed by the rhetoric around things. It's a classic problem with measuring

I think it's great to bring more measures of pain to bear on things but admit I'm disturbed by the rhetoric around things. It's a classic problem with measuring anything neuropsychological: pain is inherently subjective. So when I read an entire article talking about how we need "objective" rather than "subjective" measures of pain it seems not only logically and scientifically misguided, but also inherently dismissive of patient experience, like their subjective experience is irrelevant. The thing you're measuring is a subjective experiential quantity. There's so much literature showing that inherently "psychological" things are integral to pain experience there's no way to disentangle them. Another poster was noting that pain is affected by experience — so if a pain is new to a patient, does that mean we should ignore their experience of it? If we know that pain perception is amplified by anxiety or fear, we should dismiss it? I know from firsthand clinical experience the problems with report of pain — misrepresentation in drug seeking, for example — but I almost feel like you'd be better off studying that than anything else. The rest of the stuff they mention is great and all parts of the puzzle but it's all minor parts of the whole process of pain perception, and the whole idea of dismissing "subjective" pain seems absurd to me, because pain is subjective.