Measuring Pain?

[sanctus]

I was just curious if it is possible to measure pain to compare.

 

The reason I wonder about this is that a male friend had kidney stones (the ones you have to piss out) and people were saying that the pain is for men on the same level as giving birth to women. I thought that it is just BS, because how much you feel pain is subjective anyway and that it is not comparable.

Then I started to wonder whether it is possible to measure it for real, like measuring an activation of a part of the brain or the quantity of release of a substance in the brain or ??

[SaxonViolence]

My own thought:

 

Someday it may be possible to compare the absolute pain of one event to another—probably by measuring the amount of raw data in the form of pain messages each transmits through the sensory nerves.

 

I don't think that we're quite there yet.

 

Even so, I would imagine that different folks might very well experience very different amounts of Dysphoria with the same amount of pain, even with identical "Pain Inputs" from the exact same area.

 

So far as Child Birth:

 

I am reasonably certain that some of the physiological events—pounding pulse, strained breathing, surging hormones—adds as much to the discomfort as having an unusually large object pass through the birth canal.

 

But then again, there are many physiological changes associated with Kidney Stones.

 

When I had them, I had fever, vomiting, infection and other stuff going on.

 

I'm sure that simply having a BB pushed quickly through my Ureter and then through my Urethra would have occasioned far less drama—though I might have let out some dramatic shrieks along the way.

 

 

Saxon Violence

[Jane515]

I think that there is physical pain, and then there is the way we experience physical pain psychologically. There is also a big difference between the way we report a level of pain during the pain and after the pain has occurred and is over. For example, many mothers will complain of terrible pain during childbirth and then say that they cannot remember the pain later. 

 

We might be able to measure what happens in the body during physical pain, but I think there are too many psychological possibilities to really be able to say that one person's pain is stronger or not as strong as another. 

[RainMan]

This presents a big problem when prescribing medications to ease pain. I've always wondered about this because sometimes people can get prescribed a medication that is stronger than needed. All because there is no accurate way to gauge it.

[Hans Albert Quistorff- LM]

True current practice is to measure pain subjectively such as 0 no pain to 10 worst pain you have experienced.

It is more objective if a base line is established by a known pressure being subjectively rated. If it is rated as 1 they are more pain tolerant than someone rating it as 5.

I explain pain to my clients as the bodies message to the conscious mind that something needs to be done different. If you do not do something different the intensity increases and the autonomic nervous system tries to do something different which may cause pain somewhere else.

[arissa]

I am not too sure on this but I have had friends go through the same thing and it was very painful. Some people handle pain different too. After having two kids I am still thankful that I decided on the epidural.

[Laci]

Pain is so individualized, I agree. Whenever I visit the doctor they ask me, "On a scale of 1 to 10 what is your pain level?" I try to be realistic about this because I know so many people that I deal with will usually say that it is an 8 or a 9. One medical staff member that I know has an excellent way of asking this question. She says that on a scale of 1 to 10 with 10 being eaten by sharks what is your pain level. They are a little more cautious when asked that way and hesitate for a minute or two before answering. :)