From psychophysics to the clinic: missteps and advances

People live in different oral sensory worlds. This variation affects health and quality of life. The need to make valid comparisons across individuals/groups to reveal this variation highlighted invalid use of conventional labeled scales (e.g., visual analogue, category scales). Valid comparisons can be made with magnitude matching and the general Labeled Magnitude Scale (gLMS) employing multiple standards (real and remembered), thus permitting associations between oral sensation, preferences, intake (e.g., fats, vegetables), and health outcomes (e.g., cancer, phantoms, burning mouth syndrome). These measurement insights broadly apply to sensory/hedonic assessment of differences across groups in many different fields. As an illustration, we assess differences across groups experiencing different types of pain. (C) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.