How Is Pain Measured?

Marc L said:
In beers, usually.

Marc
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Beer is a useful pain indicater generally. I'm sure there's a 1:1 correlation between the amount of extra pain one is able to withstand while under the influence of beer, and the increased likelihood of causing oneself that pain accidentally, due to the influence of beer.

I'll call it the Budvar Hypothesis.
 
Soapy Sam said:
That's interesting. I also have a 0-10 scale I came up with for my arthritis.
I've never been over 5 for more than a few seconds. It's sort of logarithmic.
At 7 I would probably chew my own head off.
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Surely it's arith-metical...
 
I thought there was 3 levels of pain:

1. Less painful than mouth pain
2. Mouth pain
3. Something worse than mouth pain???

LLH
 
Soapy Sam said:
That's interesting. I also have a 0-10 scale I came up with for my arthritis.
I've never been over 5 for more than a few seconds. It's sort of logarithmic.
At 7 I would probably chew my own head off.
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My personal pain scale isn't alogrithmic - 1 is a pinprick, 10 is the worst pain I have ever felt in my life (an unanestathised tooth extraction).
 
TobiasTheCommie said:
i'm currently at 4 on a 10 scale(logarithmic).

It is a migraine that has been building for about a week. it started at 2 last week, came and went a few times and slowly increased to 3. Today it is at 4.

Now, it hasn't be constant pain for the last week, coming and going, sometimes a day or two between the pain. But.. today i'm at 4.

*sigh*

time to pop pills.
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I thought in order for a migraine to be called a migraine, they are all 10's. I thought they are so bad that you even dry-heave from them. Anything lesser would just be a headache, wouldnt' it? And a 4, only? Different if you said an 8.
 
Originally Posted by Jeff Corey
That exemplifies the problem with nonexperimental research. How do we know whether these gender differences you cite are not due to differential treatment during infancy , childhood and young adulthood?

bpesta22's response:
It's possible, but why would they then vary with the cycle?

Could differential treatment affect pupil size changes in responses to different magnitudes of electric shock?



Jeff Corey's response:
It could through stimulus generalization as an aftereffect of pavlovian (respondent) conditioning.
"Does your dogga bite?"
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This got me thinking. I don't know about magnitudes, but what if someone came up to you with a pit bull and as you talked, the dog suddenly lunged, for no apparent reason, and took a bite out of the person? Perhaps the pupils of the person would dilate differently than if the pit bull's owner came up to the person he was going to talk to and said the the person should not to be surprised if his dog tried to bite the person,... and the advance warning might instill some different bodily response mechanisms and stimuli, by the person being forewarned.
 
bpesta22 said:
For pain research, a long time ago, people used a dolorimeter-- a device for inflicting various levels of pain on a person's skin. The researchers were the own subjects (go figure) and mapped out the scale of perception for painful stimuli!.
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I don't know if it's still called a dolorimeter, but this research is of course still being done. In college I participated in a study for a lab I was working in.
 
There must have been research measuring the various intensities of blue balls in this way.
 
The worst pain I ever experienced was an ear infection - you know, the one babys get. I went to the doctor, he pierced the blisters on my eardrums, and I felt better.

An hour later I was all but paralyzed with pain. My wife went and filled my prescription for codine. If I hadn't been a believer in science before that, it would have converted me - the sheer bliss of pain receding was miracle-quality.

The second worst pain I ever had was shingles - and I didn't even notice it for the first week. One day I discovered that punching myself in the head actually made me feel better. That's when I went to the doctor.

On the other hand, I got run over by a truck while riding my motorcycle. Rolled off the hood and slid down the road a ways. Wound up in the burn tank at the hospital while they picked gravel out of my back.

It was the only time in my life I have seen a medical professional warn me that I was going to hurt. The nurses actually seemed sympathetic.

But to be honest, it didn't bother me very much. I still remember how amazed the nurses were that I wasn't flinching.

/shrug
 
I've been hit by a car going 50 mph, had throat surgery, had the bones in my pinky finger smashed to pieces. The pain from those was trifling compared to the pain of a stubbed toe. Of course the pain from a stubbed toe is only at its most intense for a fraction of a second, but if it did last longer it would be unbearable.
 
I tend to think of the following pain standard: Take a bare shin and strike it on the edge of a coffee table at walking speed. I call that, 1 second after impact, a 7. But it fades quickly to a 5 that lasts few dozen seconds.
 
Pain should not be the "fifth" vital sign (after heart rate, blood pressure, temperature, and respirations). It's too subjective. The fifth vital sign should be BMI, but that's just my opinion.

Interesting "BUMP", though. Sounds like the person referred to in the original discussion suffered from CREST syndrome. She might have had possible diverticulosis that they thought had converted to diverticulitis, indicating a possible small perforation in the bowel (which would necessitate surgical correction). And, they might have been wrong about that.

Either way, I too loathe the subjectivity of the pain scale. In the hospital when I'm covering the acute pain service, it has not been uncommon for some nurses, as part of what they perceive to be the paramount part of their routine evaluation, to awaken an otherwise sound-asleep patient to ask them what their pain score is... for which they usually get an "it's 10 out of 10"... before they page me at 3:00 AM to tell me that this person who'd just five minutes previously been resting comfortably is having uncontrolled pain.

:bwall

~Dr. Imago
 
Yahzi said:
The worst pain I ever experienced was an ear infection - you know, the one babys get. I went to the doctor, he pierced the blisters on my eardrums, and I felt better.

An hour later I was all but paralyzed with pain. My wife went and filled my prescription for codine. If I hadn't been a believer in science before that, it would have converted me - the sheer bliss of pain receding was miracle-quality.

The second worst pain I ever had was shingles - and I didn't even notice it for the first week. One day I discovered that punching myself in the head actually made me feel better. That's when I went to the doctor.

On the other hand, I got run over by a truck while riding my motorcycle. Rolled off the hood and slid down the road a ways. Wound up in the burn tank at the hospital while they picked gravel out of my back.

It was the only time in my life I have seen a medical professional warn me that I was going to hurt. The nurses actually seemed sympathetic.

But to be honest, it didn't bother me very much. I still remember how amazed the nurses were that I wasn't flinching.

/shrug
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RE: The latter, with the gravel business--How did it feel the next day, and the day after that?
Idle minds with scabbed over road rash want to know.:D
 
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