Final answer:
Patients describe their health issues through symptoms, which are subjective experiences like pain or nausea. Assessment tools like the Wong-Baker Faces pain-rating scale help quantify these symptoms. Health surveys convert personal health perceptions into data that assists in understanding population health trends.
Step-by-step explanation:
The patient's verbal descriptions of their health issues, feelings, and perceptions are known as symptoms. Symptoms are subjective and can only be described by the patient, not measured objectively like signs. For example, nausea, loss of appetite, and pain are symptoms that can indicate health problems but depend on a patient's self-report. To assess these symptoms effectively, various methods like the Wong-Baker Faces pain-rating scale may be employed, which helps in quantifying pain on a scale from 0-10. Furthermore, physiological responses such as skin conductance fluctuations are sometimes measured to quantify pain more objectively, as these reflect the sympathetic nervous system's response to pain stimuli.
Patient-reported symptoms and health perceptions play a vital role in diagnosing diseases and are essential in developing health interventions. Health surveys such as the one conducted by the CDC's BRFSS convert subjective health ratings into objective data, facilitating the understanding of a population's health. Such surveys often inquire about the patient's general health and the number of days with poor physical or mental health, providing a picture of a region's overall wellbeing.