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Last updated: Wed, Aug 14, 2024
Another idea that seems to be popular among medical care providers is that patients exaggerate their reports of pain. The subjective nature of pain allows this idea to persist. The section Pain Intensity explains the difficulty in objectively measuring pain intensity. The idea that patients exaggerate symptoms is related to ideas about psychogenic pain. See Somatization, Psychogenic Pain, and So Forth, and especially Waddell's Signs about this idea.
I suspect that patients in pain who are frustrated by their lack of progress and by the vague, deflecting, or avoidant communications of their care providers would tend to express their distress more forcefully than patients who have experienced progress or those who understand the limtations of medical understanding of this class of problems. That's been part of my motivation in sharing this material.