A recent New York Times opinion piece focuses on pain and our ability to communicate about it, both as speakers and listeners. You can find a link to the article here:

[How to Talk About Pain][1]

As attorneys representing injured people in medical malpractice actions, it is often a difficult task to get jurors to “feel” our client’s pain and properly compensate them for it. Various words can describe various pains, such as stabbing, burning, and crushing. A particularly useful description from the article is a woman’s description of the pain of neuralgia (a type of nerve pain): “a powerful engine when the director turns some little key, and the monster is at once aroused, and plunges along the pathway, screaming and breathing forth flames.”

Focusing on the hearer of the pain complaints is a difficult subject when treating a patient with pain. Some patients in great pain are loath to call a nurse for additional medications for fear of being a complainer, or shamed as a malingerer. Some folks are stoic about their pain; others less so. Some ask for medications for their pain, others do not.

Similarly, as a juror without the specific experience of the plaintiff’s pain, it’s difficult to stand in the shoes of him or her and empathize. Pain is a complex symptom made more so by the language – or lack thereof – we’ve developed to discuss it. This is particularly the case when asking a jury to allow money damages for it for a victim of medical malpractice. Yet that’s what plaintiff attorneys do every day in courts across the nation.

[1]: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/13/opinion/sunday/how-to-talk-about-pain.html?emc=eta1&_r=0 “How to Talk About Pain”