Pain is a difficult beast to grapple with, hard to measure and therefore to treat. Pain can be an important distress signal and failing to investigate it could mean a missed opportunity to save a life – or it may be something much more minor.
For such a universal experience, pain remains much of a mystery – especially the task of determining how much pain someone is in. "We understand it so poorly," says Emma Pierson, a computer scientist at Stanford University researching pain. "In particular, the fact that human doctors are frequently left flummoxed by why a patient is in pain suggests that our current medical understanding of pain is quite bad."