WOMEN IN PAIN
A Co-creation Workshop
A collaborative workshop designed to give both - women in physical and emotional pain, the tools to create a personal pain scale to describe their symptoms.
Problem: There is no objective way to measure pain. Doctors and family members of patients have a hard time believing an invisible illness as pain often has no physical indicators.
The industry standard to describe pain in today's time is by using the Wong-Baker Pain Scale pictured below. Although without knowing the patient's pain threshold, it becomes hard for doctors to differentiate the intensity of a patient's pain as their pain is different, and their reaction and interpretation of the pain are different.
PERSONAL PAIN SCALE
A scale designed to represent what the patient's body is going through with reference to their past pain experiences and threshold.
Participants started with writing down the ‘worst pain they can imagine.' One of the answers that a participant wrote was ‘my child dying in front of me.’ They gradually moved on to write about the worst pain they have experienced and then what the pain they experienced yesterday and today felt like. They were then encouraged to rate all individual experiences with respect to its intensity and duration. Some rate their pain with numbers, some with words and some graphically by placing the worst pain cards on the extreme ends.
RESULT: Participants expressed that this would be a great way to paint their thresholds in a snapshot and show it to the doctor.
Photographs by Smruti Adya, Sophie Carrillo Miranda, Yangying Ye, Phuong Anh Nguyen, Qixuan Wang