Pain Detection Tool
For many years, a real dilemma for legal and medical experts has been determining the veracity of personal-injury claims. Is the victim really in great pain, or is he feigning it so as to get a large monetary settlement?
A new method of pain detection—thermography—may be the answer. “The technique uses infrared sensors to make a multi-colored picture of temperature variations on the skin,” says a report in The Globe and Mail of Canada. Pain in soft tissue, which cannot be detected by X ray, will show up in the infrared picture because of temperature differences due to muscle spasms or constriction of blood vessels. Courts in several states in the US have accepted thermograms as evidence.




