“
In Tulsa, Oklahoma, two pediatric nurses—Donna Wong and her colleague, Connie Baker—sought a way of assessing pain in children who had trouble describing what they felt. Wong was incorrectly diagnosed with leukemia as a child, and subjected to painful operations without the aid of analgesics. She became a nurse. In the 1980s, with the smiley face fad in recent memory, the women devised a series of six faces a child could point to. The chart begins with a smiling face and ends with a tearful, grimacing face. The Wong-Baker FACES scale is now a standard in gauging pain in children. There are other versions for adults. Patients are asked to quantify their pain according to a scale—numbered from 0 to 10, 10 being worst. These scales were highly subjective, but they were about the only pain-measurement tools medicine had to offer.
”
”