I respectfully disagree and refer you to the evidence below:

Your potato soup: 👍
My wife’s potato soup: 👍👍

Having a launcher open in the background is less conspicuous of having the game open in the background.

Persistent pain is debilitating. Most senses can be adapted to - your brain stops listening to it. Smells, touch, hot, cold, sounds, lights - all these senses can be adapted to and you stop noticing them after a few minutes.

Pain cannot be ignored. Your brain will never stop listening to it. It’s why it’s so important for people who suffer from chronic pain to be referred to pain management to have someone who can treat it specifically.

My wife makes the best potato soup. She found some recipe for “loaded potato soup” that called for basically all the same stuff you’d put in a good loaded potato and then added her own spin to it.

I offered a bowl to my neighbor and he declined with a weird look, like “why would you ever offer potato soup to somebody?”

I brought him a small bowl anyway. Potato soup topped with sour cream, crispy bacon, and green onions. He said it was the best soup he’d ever had, and he didn’t realize potato soup could taste like that.

It’s for (subjective) improvement. If the patient is getting better (pain scale going down), then great! If not, we can try alternative therapies.

Simple example is someone with back pain. We give them ibuprofen. Pain still the same. We give them a toradol shot. Pain goes down. Now we have an idea of the severity.

If the pain still persists with toradol or even tramadol or something, now we should definitely look into complex imaging (e.g. MRI) to see objective facts about their anatomy - is there visibile compression on a nerve? Is there a slipped disk?

It’s just to get an idea of a subjective pain scale and to mark progress.

This is how I pitch it to all my patients - 0 is no pain and 10 is incapacitated.