A claim has been raised that economic indicators alone have limits in assessing a nation’s prosperity and quality of life, and that physical pain should be measured regularly.

Gigazine, an online media outlet, reported on April 6 local time that Lucia Macchia (루시아 마치아), a psychology researcher at City St George’s, University of London, proposed that pain is not simply a medical issue but is deeply intertwined with economic and social conditions. She suggested it should be included in national-level wellbeing indicators.

Macchia defined pain as a phenomenon linked to economic circumstances, social connections and everyday behavior in a 2023 comment in the journal Nature Human Behaviour. Adding pain-related questions to surveys governments use to assess people’s quality of life could help capture individuals’ mental and physical conditions in a more multidimensional way, the report said.

Studies she cited show pain can move with broader social changes. A 2022 paper, “Pain trends and pain growth disparities (2009-2021),” analyzed data from about 1.6 million people in 146 countries and reported the share of people complaining of pain rose to 32.1 percent in 2021 from 26.3 percent in 2009. The increase appeared in both high-income and low-income countries, and was especially larger among women and among lower-income and lower-education groups.

Links with economic conditions were also identified. A 2021 paper, “Physical pain, gender, and the state of the economy in 146 nations,” found that countries with higher unemployment rates tended to have more people experiencing pain. The pattern was not limited to individuals who were unemployed but appeared as an increase in pain across society, and the rise was particularly pronounced among women, it said.

Social factors also had an impact. A study using Gallup World Poll data found that people who feel lonely were more likely to experience pain than those who do not. Differences existed by country, but the link between pain and social isolation was widely observed.

Macchia presented pain not as a concept that replaces existing indicators but as an element that complements them. “Just adding a simple question to a survey can help identify quality of life more accurately,” she said, proposing repeated measurement of items such as whether someone felt pain the day before and how severe their current pain level is.