@juliaferraioli Pain scales seem like an arbitrary, bad design. I've heard the high end as "the worst pain you've ever felt". It's immediately tied to my experience, culture etc. The fact that it ignores day-to-day pain experience may be worse. It's a hard problem to solve. It seems we don't.
@jduffyrice This feels like a really interesting cluster analysis problem. The most appropriate machine learning method would be semi supervised topic modeling. It's a method still being researched - no standard toolkit. What's your timetable?