Thinking about the preoperative phase, what aspects of those early discussions about pain do you think have the greatest impact on how patients later experience and interpret pain after surgery?

I think the first thing to understand is that pain is an experience.

It's not a biological variable like a blood pressure or a blood sugar or a serum potassium.

It's an experience and we're asking a patient to put that into words and So that we can understand that experience.

And that's quite a hard thing for anyone to do.

And we've all of us as clinicians seen patients struggle to explain to us what they're feeling.

And then I think that when we're trying to.

I'm going to jump in and say, so what do you think, having said that, what do you think we should be saying to them?