Every one of our clients has suffered some harm giving rise to a claim. Some harm is easier to quantify than others. In particular, if one can show that the injured person cannot do the work that she used to do because of the negligence of the defendant, she may be entitled to money to replace the wages she has lost. Similarly, if medical and other bills have been paid or likely will need to be paid in the future, money can pay those bills.

However, most of my clients also have “pain and suffering” damages, harm that cannot easily be quantified by calculating wages lost or medical bills to be incurred. This often includes harm in the form of actual, day-to-day, pain. Pain is a difficult thing for many people to understand sufficient to feel comfortable translating it into a figure that will adequately compensate the person for having to endure it.

Recently, there is an emerging trend in personal injury litigation to make more concrete this pain by using neuroscience. In particular, some doctors and researchers are using fMRI technology (“Functional magnetic resonance imaging”) to actually show the locations in the brain that become active with pain. The thought is that, by standardizing the pain a person has (as opposed to amorphous and subjective 1-10 scales), juries will be more likely to understand, accept, and more easily allow for money damages to compensate for the pain.

An article describing these new efforts can be found here:

[Personal injury lawyers turn to neuroscience to back claims of chronic pain](http://www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/personal_injury_lawyers_turn_to_neuroscience_to_back_claims_of_chronic_pain)