[kulahan]

I would agree with him if I think about it. Pain is a side effect. You are never trying to treat pain, you’re trying to treat whatever is causing pain.

This doesn’t even get into the fact that people might experience diminished or increased pain for a myriad of reasons which could completely throw off the severity assessment.

There are probably better methods to determine the seriousness of a scenario? I’m not a doctor.

[taneq]

I see where you're coming from but I think you're completely missing the actual discussion. Sure, The degree of perceived pain might be affected by many other factors. There's no distinction between 'pain' and 'perception of pain' because pain is a perception. Sure, we're not trying to fix the pain, we're trying to fix the problem, and the pain is a symptom of the problem.

However, this is an actual person we're trying to fix, and their pain is real, to them. I'm not sure in what way some quibble about "oh it's not actually caused by mechanical damage to your left clavicle, it's just a sensor issue" is going to comfort someone whose shoulder is fuckin' killing them. We need to fix that shoulder bearing, sure, but we also need to mute the alarms for a while, because we're not monsters.