[HN Gopher] Researchers search for more precise ways to measure ...
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Researchers search for more precise ways to measure pain
Author : Petiver
Score : 52 points
Date : 2025-03-24 03:57 UTC (19 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.washingtonpost.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.washingtonpost.com)
| dkenyser wrote:
| https://archive.is/kgtlw
| perching_aix wrote:
| I've been recently wondering if this is a "thing" in medical
| research, and I'm extremely glad to hear that it is. Especially
| in tech I think we all know how frustrating it is to only ever
| get vague, pre-interpreted reports of issues, particularly when
| those issues are non-deterministic or otherwise tough-to-
| reproduce.
|
| I can only hope that once these methods mature to everyday use
| levels, people will keep in mind the gap between the measurement
| and the phenomenon. Just like how a GPS tracker doesn't track the
| object (or pet, or whatever) you put it on but itself, these
| methods will also only detect pain they're compatible with
| detecting, and miss others. I can already imagine the
| conversations with various parties insisting that a patient isn't
| actually feeling pain because whatever devices are not reporting
| so (or the opposite!). Still, I don't think this should keep
| these devices from existing.
| PaulKeeble wrote:
| They might miss a type of pain that the current trials aren't
| measuring because healthcare doesn't believe that group of
| patients and further entrench that prejudice into the measure.
| It's a very real risk of such a device.
| PaulKeeble wrote:
| In the meantime if you are actually in chronic pain it's worth
| knowing research has shown that 6 out of 10 is the best number
| for patients to use. Below 6 and insurance doesn't pay out and
| healthcare workers consider it normal and if your not writhing
| and scream on agony right now you can't possibly be above. 6 has
| the best chance of success.
|
| Alas even the best is not a high chance there are millions
| suffering chronic pain, because in the absence of a biomarker and
| withdrawal of opioids, many probably most sufferers are left
| without any relief and suffer the consequences. It's not about
| you it's about the doctor there was nothing you could have done,
| prejudice and stigma over pain is rife within healthcare.
| j_bum wrote:
| I have a PhD in neuroscience, where I studied circadian rhythm
| disruption and its effect on pain behavior. So I feel qualified
| to discuss this.
|
| In humans, pain has two primary components [0]:
|
| 1. The sensory-discriminative component: where on my body, what
| type (hot? cold? chemical?), and how _intense_ is the noxious
| stimulus?
|
| 2. The affective-emotional component: how much does the pain
| _hurt_ , and how does it affect emotional state?
|
| Very importantly, both #1 and #2 are considered "pain", and they
| can be experienced both simultaneously and independently. Pain is
| _entirely_ subjective, as TFA highlights.
|
| It does sound valuable to search for biomarkers of the sensory-
| discriminative component. But I'm doubtful that biomarkers for #2
| are readily observable, beyond fMRI. The "Nociometer" may capture
| this, but what if it doesn't in a reliable way, since it's
| designed to test #1? TFA discussed how this could save money for
| health-care system money; this gives me an awful feeling.
|
| Relying on "biomarker-based pain measurements" worries me that
| patients who are primarily experiencing affective-emotional
| components of pain will only further be doubted or not trusted by
| physicians.
|
| There are already far, _far_ too many examples of physicians not
| trust patients about pain. Re: women at Yale undergoing IVF
| treatments without fentanyl injections due to a drug misusing
| nurse stealing the fentanyl. Physicians responded to the
| unanesthetized women in excruciating pain by saying, "maybe you
| are immune to fentanyl!" [1*].
|
| I think we should tread lightly.
|
| --
|
| [0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6676053/
|
| [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/09/health/yale-ivf-egg-
| retri...
|
| *There is a heart breaking podcast on this scandal, which is how
| I originally learned about it [2]. Of course when I was in horror
| telling my wife about the story, the news came as no surprise to
| her, as she's experienced pain disbelief from physicians her
| entire life.
|
| [2] https://www.thisamericanlife.org/804/the-retrievals
| odyssey7 wrote:
| Maybe this explanation is intentionally simplified, but what
| it's telling me is that medical science is just lost.
| j_bum wrote:
| Well, I wouldn't go that far. The brain is incredibly
| complicated, and frankly we are still very far from
| understanding much about how it works.
|
| But this doesn't mean we aren't making incredible
| advancements. Discoveries are constantly being made in the
| background and are continuing to build up over time.
|
| For example, a non-addictive pain medication was just
| approved by the FDA [0]. This will undoubtedly improve
| millions of lives and prevent uncountable numbers of people
| from misusing opiates in the future.
|
| [0] https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-
| appr...
| Spivak wrote:
| But it's listed for acute pain, don't opiates already work
| well for that use-case? My understanding is that the time-
| limited nature of them and lack of continued access makes
| dependence unlikely and that the holy grail is a solution
| for chronic pain.
| rqtwteye wrote:
| The lack of continued access leads a lot of people into
| fentanyl and other drugs.
| debacle wrote:
| The problem is that, despite medical science making advances
| abound, doctoring as a profession changes exceptionally
| slowly, and most doctors (especially male doctors IME) take
| an adversarial approach to patients who have questions.
|
| I have a relatively common autoimmune disease. I have had
| much better experiences with NPs than doctors in explaining
| that certain medications are contraindicated for people with
| my disease.
|
| Ego has always been a massive issue in medicine. I wonder if
| this is exclusive to the US, or if we see it everywhere.
| rqtwteye wrote:
| You need to have a big ego to take on the responsibility of
| a doctor. A lot of people can't handle it emotionally so
| the job selects for people with narcissism or psychopathy.
| This is a very rough generalization but from my
| interactions with surgeons it fits pretty well.
| toast0 wrote:
| Judging pain is philosophy more than science.
|
| How do we know what is in someone else's head?
| intrasight wrote:
| We will soon enough know what's going on in people's heads.
| While it may help us better understand pain, it will
| probably cause all kinds of other unforeseen consequences.
| Spivak wrote:
| Like it's a pretty interesting research question to see if this
| very major component of the human experience can be seen and
| measured, but I'm not entirely sure what the medical value of
| such a thing could be if what you get is basically just yes no
| in pain or not and a rough intensity because you can already
| get that and more from the patient.
|
| My experience was/is annoyingly the opposite where I developed
| chronic neck pain on a relatively fast timeframe and I can't
| find a physician across all different disciplines that's
| actually interested in finding out the source. They almost
| immediately throw up their hands and want to send me to a pain
| management doctor.
| intrasight wrote:
| I too suffer chronic neck pain after an overstretch injury.
| It's been life-changing. And immensely frustrating that no
| diagnosis can be done.
| light_hue_1 wrote:
| Even neuroimaging isn't enough. fMRI doesn't have a great track
| record for predicting pain. It works to an extent, but it's not
| like there's a simple area that lets you accurately and
| directly decode the pain level someone is experiencing. And
| there's no new neuroimaging in the pipeline that would let us
| do this in a clinically relevant setting. There's a lot of hype
| around various optical methods, but it'll be a long road even
| if they work.
|
| In the meantime, we should take much more advantage of the gap
| between the sensory and the affective components!
|
| There are many other science-based pain management methods than
| just drugs. These other methods don't change the sensory part,
| the pain is there, but they can dramatically change the quality
| of your life with how you feel the pain.
|
| CBT is very effective for pain management. Even something as
| simple as distracting yourself from a painful stimulus like a
| medical procedure can make a huge difference.
|
| For example, your doctor doesn't routinely tell you to show
| your kids a fun video while they get a shot. But it makes a
| massive quality of life difference. Without Elmo, my daughter
| will cry for 5-10 minutes and just be miserable for half an
| hour. With Elmo, the shot comes, she's annoyed, there are tears
| for a 5-10 seconds, and then she's fine. There's no reason to
| not make this routine, except that we think of pain as
| something entirely objective instead of something that is
| largely subjective.
|
| I think this research falls into that trap of "This is an
| important problem, this solution is obviously bad, but we have
| no good ones, so let's do it." This is likely to cause far more
| pain than to help anyone.
| oersted wrote:
| I remember that after I had surgery on my finger (the bone
| healed wrong so they had to cut it and rotate it), a nurse
| asked me to rate my pain 1-10, and I said: "it's alright, like
| a 7?", and she was like "that's not alright, let me give you
| some meds".
|
| It did actually feel like a 7/10, it really hurt, but somehow
| it didn't bother me. And it was like that for weeks after the
| surgery, I didn't really end up taking any pain meds when I got
| home.
|
| And I wouldn't say my pain tolerance is generally particularly
| high, pain does usually bother me as much as anyone. Not sure
| what that was about.
| Filligree wrote:
| That sounds a bit like pain asymbolia. I'm surprised it would
| happen in just one instance, but I don't know much about it.
| short_sells_poo wrote:
| I think mental disposition is a huge component of perceiving
| pain, and it can be entirely sub-conscious. I can't speak for
| your case of course, but perhaps you were "ready" for the
| pain in your finger and what is to come and thus the panic
| inducing element was gone. You could be almost just an
| observer of the pain rather than the subject.
|
| Fear of the pain can make things much-much worse. If that
| fear is removed, you won half the battle.
|
| Of course, there are levels of pain where all of the above
| goes out the window and it is absolutely debilitating, but
| maybe that's the 13/10 pain level that hopefully most of us
| never have to experience.
| reginald78 wrote:
| I never understand those charts. To me a 10 is a state that
| only briefly exist before I passed out from agony. If I was
| at a 7 pain scale you wouldn't need to ask me, it would be
| obvious.
| CookieCrisp wrote:
| I've had what was told to me is a 10, you don't always pass
| out, unfortunately
| andrewla wrote:
| > There are already far, far too many examples of physicians
| not trust patients about pain.
|
| I am friends with a couple of ER doctors, who are probably the
| worst offenders (self-acknowledged) in this space. It's based
| on a real phenomenon, though, of drug-seeking behavior.
|
| As people with chronic pain communicate with each other
| (through things like Reddit) on the best way to communicate to
| doctors that their pain is legitimate, those techniques are
| also inadvertently taught to other people who are seeking pain
| medication for recreational purposes.
|
| I think the cause of widespread drug legalization has been
| weakened by a couple of real world efforts in that direction,
| but I still stubbornly cling to the belief that if people are
| allowed to make their own choices, then you can partition the
| recreational users from the chronic pain sufferers and maybe
| let medical science have a slightly better change of addressing
| the latter case. That said, given factors like cost and
| insurance coverage, it may just be a realigning of incentives
| rather than fixing the problem itself.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > but I still stubbornly cling to the belief that if people
| are allowed to make their own choices, then you can partition
| the recreational users from the chronic pain sufferers
|
| I can empathize with this thought (having had an episode of
| pain disbelief in a hospital myself) but the idea of
| partitioning recreational users from chronic pain sufferers
| isn't reflective of the reality.
|
| They aren't two mutually exclusive groups. In fact, many
| recreational users get their start from over-prescribed
| opioids. Some people experiencing pain and all of the
| associated emotional difficulties will see the sudden access
| to opioids as an opportunity or even an excuse to indulge in
| opioid excess.
|
| Self-medication with opioids also produces a very quick on-
| ramp to dependence in average users. If you're anything like
| me, you prefer to use the minimum dose of any medication and
| get off as quickly as possible. I'd rather have mild
| lingering headache pain than take an extra Ibuprofen.
|
| Not so with the much of the general public. I have friends in
| medicine who believe even Tylenol should be prescription only
| because of how frequently they see people destroying their
| livers by taking excessive amounts. Look at simple drugs like
| Afrin nasal spray and people who become severely dependent
| for months or years because they can't even read the
| directions on the bottle. Open this same door to something
| euphorically reinforcing like opioids and the number of
| people walking themselves straight into addictions because
| they wanted something stronger for the occasional headache
| would be massive.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| >> you can partition the recreational users from the chronic
| pain sufferers
|
| Except that you can't. There is no bright line between those
| two groups. Many recreational users/abusers started their
| journey when prescribed drugs for legitimate pain. Steady use
| becomes dependency, then you look for other sources, and
| quickly you are crawling dark web for a dealer in your
| neighborhood.
| Palomides wrote:
| why do you think psychological types of pain won't cause
| discernible biomarkers? well known, for example, that stress
| has lots of effects on the immune system
|
| it's all part of the same biological soup!
| neverokay wrote:
| _2. The affective-emotional component: how much does the pain
| hurt, and how does it affect emotional state?_
|
| I am going to add the spiritual aspect to this. I read a post
| on Reddit asking if Jesus truly suffered more than anyone else
| on earth, given that more people suffer for longer than his 24
| hours ish on the cross.
|
| Without believing the story of Christ at all, I was still able
| to do the mental exercise to see that the nature of the pain
| had nothing to do with the duration. For example, watching your
| mother watch you get crucified is heart stopping (or to watch
| another mother have to go through that).
|
| So, what is the purpose of a human feeling that pain as an
| experiencer or as an observer? Why would our body elicit that
| psychic pain, why wouldn't we just focus on the physical and
| ignore these other things? In that moment, your only concern
| should be the physical, but it's not just physical.
|
| The psychic pain almost has no use in a state of physical
| torture other than to inform the conscious of its duty to
| morality. Unfortunately, I do not believe science can _ever_
| conclude this is the answer (in no possible way, I'm open to
| being wrong).
| technotony wrote:
| I've found meditation very useful in this regard. If you focus
| on observing in detail #1 type pain, you find that the #2
| becomes much more managable. The technique is to get curious
| about the pain, ask what type it is (hot/cold/electric etc),
| where exactly is the pain. what shape is it? how does it change
| over time? It sounds counter-intuitive but by focusing on it it
| becomes easier to manage (because I think a lot of #2 is story
| and mental reactions to the pain rather than the actual pain
| itself and the mental reactions are self-fulfilling in a
| negative way).
| dkarl wrote:
| I'm fascinated by the athletic side of all of this.
|
| I have a friend who has had the aspiration to become a regular
| exerciser for years, but he says everything he tries just hurts
| too much. I exercise regularly myself, but we haven't found a
| way to talk about it, because it's so hard to share subjective
| sensations of pain. In some sense, everything I do hurts, too,
| and everyone who works out or plays a sport acknowledges a lot
| of pain. People differentiate routine pain from pain that
| requires effort to endure and distinguishes both of those from
| pain that indicates an injury happening or being aggravated,
| and people value and hone their ability to distinguish the
| second two from each other, because they don't want to get
| injured but also don't want to let pain hold them back from
| doing something that makes their body healthier and stronger.
|
| I've known people who have endured through pain and suffered
| terrible consequences from it. Five years ago, my wife's aunt
| loved to say "I'm a tough old bird," and she has since lost a
| leg unnecessarily, because she thought that having high pain
| tolerance was a viable alternative to going to a doctor. Now
| she's in a wheelchair and does everything the doctors say.
|
| Other people have had opposite experiences, where learning to
| disregard pain led to breakthroughs for them. One woman I know
| set a big triathlon PR a year after having a kid, and when
| people asked her how she was able to do that, she said, "After
| having a kid, the pain just wasn't a big deal to me anymore."
| She's big into the science, so I expected to hear something
| about hormones, but for her, her expanded pain tolerance was
| the entire explanation for her better performance.
|
| Personally, just doing normal exercise presents me with an
| incredibly rich variety of "painful" sensations and a lot of
| difficult decisions. Right now I have a nagging shoulder
| injury, and every time an exercise generates a "painful"
| sensation in my shoulder, I have to decide, is this reflective
| of something making this injury worse? better? neutral impact?
| Should I stop right away so I don't aggravate the injury, or
| should I do this exercise more often because it's stimulating
| the tissue in just the right way? There's so much said and
| written about it, but it often seems frustratingly
| tautological. You have to know what the sensations mean before
| you can figure out which words refer to which sensations.
| nottorp wrote:
| It's complicated. Do any kind of sports and muscle pain will
| just mean you worked hard, which is generally good.
|
| Do a martial art and you'll learn to ignore pain from hits to
| non sensitive areas too.
|
| But if you have a brain you'll still care about joint pain
| and pain from hits to areas where it could cause serious
| damage.
|
| I'd let that shoulder heal a bit :)
| jrgoff wrote:
| I'm not sure how this fits in, but in my experience a further
| complication as someone with chronic pain/illness is that often
| the thing that bothers me the most isn't what I would describe
| as painful. I would describe it as very uncomfortable but on a
| different axis than pain. As a simple example that I think most
| people can relate to - I do not think of being dizzy as
| painful, but it's very impactful if you are dizzy all of the
| time. I had an episode of vertigo that was one of the most
| miserable experiences of my life but I don't think I
| experienced much pain during it.
|
| I guess if the goal is to tell whether the person needs pain
| meds that complication may not matter as much since they don't
| help (afaik) with those symptoms. But I do sometimes feel like
| my health problems get taken less seriously if I report on my
| pain levels rather than my discomfort and/or how it impacts me.
| Eventually I found a migraine pain scale that focuses on how it
| affects your life rather than directly how physically painful
| it is and that helped me have a normalized system for
| reporting.
| INTPenis wrote:
| True scifi will be when the doctor can use a machine to feel what
| the patient feels.
|
| "Ah, now I see Mr. K. Dilkington. You clearly have old cold belly
| badness."
| kevlened wrote:
| This is a Black Mirror episode based on a short story by Penn
| Jillette (of Penn & Teller)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Museum_(Black_Mirror)
| petercooper wrote:
| Poor misunderstood Karl. I knew what he meant when he said that
| glass ashtrays hold cold.
| Fin_Code wrote:
| Pain is relative to experience and tolerance. Using patient input
| is inherently flawed.
| taneq wrote:
| I'm unsure how to interpret this statement. Are you saying that
| the amount of pain experienced depends on the patient's prior
| exposure and some 'tolerance' stat? And that we should ignore
| their actual statements about, and reactions to, stimulus when
| assessing the effect of that stimulus on them?
| debacle wrote:
| My son had a testicular torsion. Normally, this is 10/10 pain
| and vomiting and fever and shock. All sorts of awfulness. If
| you didn't know it, you would have assumed his pain was no
| more than 4/10. It took an insistent pediatric nurse to
| convince us that something very serious was going on and that
| he needed to go to the ER right away.
| kulahan wrote:
| I would agree with him if I think about it. Pain is a side
| effect. You are never trying to treat pain, you're trying to
| treat whatever is causing pain.
|
| This doesn't even get into the fact that people might
| experience diminished or increased pain for a myriad of
| reasons which could completely throw off the severity
| assessment.
|
| There are probably better methods to determine the
| seriousness of a scenario? I'm not a doctor.
| gaoshan wrote:
| Probably not exactly the same but I remember trying to describe a
| type of pain I felt to a doctor in the US. I called it "sour"
| (which is how it would be described in Chinese) and the doctor
| laughed saying that didn't mean anything to him. I think it is
| extremely accurate and descriptive but to him it didn't even
| register as having meaning.
| elric wrote:
| I am often baffled by how some people are able to articulate
| how a specific pain feels or even where exactly the pain is.
| Describing pain intensity is hard beyond "not very painful" and
| "very painful". But adding a dimension of pain type is
| something I struggle with. Sour pain makes as much sense to me
| as piercing pain, which is to say: no sense at all.
|
| I've been pierced (not for fun or aesthetics) by large nails in
| an accident, and it felt nothing like the icepick headaches I
| get, which my doctor tells me are a piercing pain.
|
| Human internal experience is weird as fuck. If it can help
| diagnostics in any way, I'm all for more precise pain
| measurements. But I'm sure someone will abuse that research for
| torture.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| I think it's entirely possible that different people
| experience pain very differently.
|
| If true, that makes it fundamentally impossible to fully
| communicate about it.
|
| I read an SF story where telepaths were as doctors. They'd
| enter the patient's mind, feel what they feel, and recognize
| the symtoms, because they had actually _felt_ how all common
| conditions feel.
|
| Maybe we can get to something similar with AI and brain
| scanning one day?
| kulahan wrote:
| It would be wild if everyone experienced pain differently
| despite having pretty much identical tools for experiencing
| it. That would probably open so many cans of worms...
| ALittleLight wrote:
| Even without telepathy I think AI will get there. Doctors
| don't have that much time or access with a patient. Imagine
| telling ChatGPT what you feel, what your symptoms are, it
| asks follow up questions, gives some suggestions on changes
| or over the counter remedies, and comes to a diagnosis.
|
| Once ChatGPT has done that 10 million times, and can learn
| from or search those records, vague descriptions of
| symptoms will likely sound pretty similar.
| voidUpdate wrote:
| I would generally describe a piercing/stabbing pain as very
| localised and relatively painful, as opposed to something
| like an aching pain, which is over a larger area and
| generally less intense. I don't think I really use more
| descriptors than that when referring to pain
| intrasight wrote:
| Once asked by a nurse if it's a stabbing pain or an aching
| pain, I replied that I've never been stabbed so I wouldn't
| know.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| I had a colonoscopy once, and they struggled to get around
| the bend, so effectively jammed the probe into the walls of
| my intestines several times.
|
| It's one of the weirdest pain experiences I've had. It was
| very painful, yet also very distinctly undefined in terms of
| location, to the point where the pain felt surreal. Like, the
| fact that I couldn't feel what was hurting made it feel like
| the pain wasn't real, yet it was clearly very painful.
| kulahan wrote:
| Isn't this basically what headaches are? We have no pain
| receptors in the brain of course, and I was under the
| impression headaches are largely refereed pain.
|
| If not all of them, it's certainly a subset, which is just
| another interesting dimension of your experience.
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| > icepick headaches I get
|
| Was the term icepick here given to you, or did you describe
| it yourself this way? That would be a good example of a
| description of piercing pain.
| maxglute wrote:
| I think the closest proximity to suan/sour is just sore. I like
| the suan metaphore, like something
| marinated/fermnated/drowning/gone slightly off in dull pain. It
| wierd because "sour" does feel very apt descriptor, English has
| sharp/stabbing/throbbing/burning/shooting/stinging/tingling/num
| bing... etc lots of metaphores. But "sour" is just your default
| sore/ache.
| poulpy123 wrote:
| There are clearly different types of pain. I use the french
| words for high and low pitch to describe two groups of pain,
| although I never used them.with a doctor because it would be
| meaningless for ut
| lijok wrote:
| Any kind of accurate pain measurement mechanism would be
| revolutionary in veterinary care.
|
| We recently found ourselves in a horrible situation. Our dog
| rapidly came down with a mystery illness that saw him go from
| bouncy to unable to stand in the span of a few hours. 6 hours of
| testing, 2nd opinions and specialists on the other side of the
| planet, and noone had a clue what was going on. A ridiculously
| primitive pain assessment was run, and we were advised that the
| dog was suffering and we should let him go.
|
| Millions of animals are put down every year on the premise they
| are in pain, usually without strong data, with owners left to
| wonder if it was too early.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Pain is relative because the psychological factor can amplify
| pain, say, someone afraid of getting a needle. The amount of hate
| they have for it definitely makes it worse
| GarnetFloride wrote:
| I've been interested in pain and pain management since having a
| drunk driver crash into us. I've even moderated a panel of
| doctors who specialized in pain.
|
| How people deal with acute vs chronic pain can be very different.
| One doctor blew my mind when he described chronic pain as a
| spousal relationship. It's something you have to live with and
| work with. You can't ignore or bully pain.
|
| Also men and women deal with pain differently. Most men describe
| a heart attack as the worst pain ever. Many women have ignored
| heart attacks because it wasn't as bad as their period pains.
| Women also describe kidney stones as worse than childbirth.
|
| I had a friend go in to the doctor and described the pain as a 5.
| But the doctor noticed they were sweating because of pain, which
| made it at least a 7 in their experience as that was an
| involuntary physical response.
|
| I've been to places not described on the pain scale, when I was
| recovering from surgery the IV drop ran out, the pain was so bad
| my spirit phased out of my body slightly so I was less aware of
| the pain but could still see the nurse running around trying to
| load another bag into the IV dispenser.
|
| I can tell when a bad storm is coming because it feels like water
| running down the inside of my leg bone, like runoff down a
| gutter. Some days the pain is dull and I can get irritated
| easily, but some over the counter pain medications are helpful.
| So if I am going to the doctor I've already exhausted the
| available options, so pain is high priority to me as I can't do
| things.
|
| I have also noticed that men's pain is taken more seriously than
| women's pain. Redheads get less pain relief and if you are person
| of color, especially a female, doctors take your pain least
| seriously. It makes me wonder how they actually teach in med
| school for that to happen.
|
| Describing the pain in terms of what work I can and cannot do
| gets more attention than anything else.
| kulahan wrote:
| It is crazy to me that womens' pain is so ignored. I've always
| (half-) joked that if men got periods, there would be 30
| alternatives to midol by the end of the month. Maybe we're just
| better at crying like babies?
|
| As a chronic pain sufferer, I experienced the same as you,
| explaining where I am limited in life rather than expressing
| how much pain I'm in gets much better results.
|
| A similar problem I've had is that I tell my doctors I have
| terrible sinus pain. Often the response to that is that I
| should consider allergy meds, as well as a confirmation that I
| am indeed "pretty stuffed up".
|
| But when I say I cannot sleep a full 8 hours due to sinus
| blockage, suddenly we need sleep evaluations, humidifiers,
| antihistamines prescribed, methods for lubricating my sinuses,
| netti pots, etc.
| newfocogi wrote:
| "Redheads get less pain relief" - are there any references you
| have so I can explore this more?
| meroes wrote:
| Chronic "pain" as a spouse is the perfect metaphor. I can't
| push through it, I have to use patience and understanding and
| it's always somewhere on my mind. That's the only way to make
| progress or be sane long term. I've grown and matured because
| of it. I've also experienced the post surgery pain that briefly
| takes you out of this world. For a split second I was in the
| Hell dimension a la Event Horizon the movie before I had taken
| my first dose of opiates and had adjusted my arm too much. I
| don't mean the pain was hellishly bad; I didn't cry out which
| is probably what a 10/10 pain would elicit. It was more like
| dread and "seeing" but not with vision the mutilated flesh and
| gore inside my repaired wrist.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| I added a children's pain scale to some software (faces in
| varying levels of pain that children can point to). I know my mom
| had chronic back pain that she complained about, but I never
| really thought about it. She functioned, she got through life.
| She was over for dinner at the time and I must have brought the
| scale up in discussion. I grabbed a paper copy and asked her what
| her pain level was, and she pointed to the second worst. Even
| after that I just kind of wrote off her pain like, she functions
| (though sometimes I would have to go get her as she got stranded
| in a supermarket in too much pain to move), and that's just life.
| I can watch a movie of some random acting dog whimper and fake
| limp and have to wipe tears from my eyes, but almost instantly
| went to ignoring my own mother's pain because she powered
| through. I hope it's not because acknowledging my mother's pain
| would have created a cost for me (doing more for her,
| acknowledging would create a long term burden on me versus the
| quick/easy/kind of cathartic/self serving release of emotion of a
| sad movie) but part of me thinks that's partially the case.
| What's the point in measuring when our response is still just a
| shrug?
| metalman wrote:
| a graduated set of instuments starting with a short, thin, very
| pointy pin then the same, dipped in weak.acid then bigger pins,
| and stronger acids the get them hot etc,etc sort of a micro
| tortures starter kit, but all calibrated and then a big pile of
| money, to attract volunteirs there is already a group that has
| been doing this with insect stings and bites, with the worst
| bieng some kind of mega sized japanese hornet, which the
| description of was, as an awe inspiring combination of bieng
| stabed with something dipped in hot acid, so.....
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